I’m not going to mansplain Adam Curtis.
In the year of our lord 2024?!?
Just watch the films and zone out to layer after juxtaposed layer of archival footage intended to “unpack how we live in a society designed around the individual, but where people increasingly feel anxious and uncertain.”
Our premier docu-collagist recently gave a fantastic interview with Crack Magazine where he opines on the various maladies of our planet, its broken political and journalistic systems… his usual lighthearted stuff.
Curtis wraps up with a bar:
My theory is that the map we currently have in our heads no longer matches the territory we are in. We’re waiting for someone to draw a new map, and until then, we’re just going to witter away to each other on podcasts.
I wonder if he’s up on HolottaCheese?
Hers is the latest in a series of brain-burning music videos by NoahSoCold that have left me feeling legitimately insane.
In that sense, it is the art of our times.
NSC is a young director, editor and VFX artist whose aesthetic can best be described as “fried.” On paper, you may find his subject matter similar to other low-budget rap videos filmed in and around gas stations in open carry states, but the end result is sui generis.
Bizarro overlays and lysergic AI transitions.
Cut-and-paste editing that’s rapid fire even by modern music video standards.
All of it is glued together with a pixelated texture of digital decay that feels like a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot (on an Android phone).
It’s the language of memes, livestreams and infinite scroll…
Adam Curtis live from the 7-11 parking lot.
Here’s AC again, from a 2021 New Yorker profile:
Fragments. That’s how people think now. They make associations, and there’s no meaning. That’s the world we live in.
He came to this epiphany while reading a frontal lobe-BBQ’d memo from the JFK assassination’s lead investigator (!!!) Jim Garrison, entitled The Theory Of Propinquity.
NSC’s vids are stuffed with Heaven’s Gate logos and breaking news graphics. Is he a conspiracy theory guy too?
I have questions…
Is it nihilistic to be lit?
Transcendent?
Both?!?
These music videos are less “no meaning” than “post meaning,” IMO. A crucial distinction, and a not-illogical response to existing in the present.
While reading a Jake Paul Men’s Health profile (lol) I was struck by the following:
If you squint, Paul really is an avatar of misspent youth, the frontman for the first generation to go through puberty with a like button. Scientists are still trying to figure out how to measure the damage (or where to send the bill).
When I showed these to my wife, she said they look like Nutter Butter TikTok (and would like to get back to watching standup on YouTube, please).
If our own silverback millennial minds break a little bit more with every daily headline, I can only imagine how NoahSoCold and his zoomer cohorts feel about the State Of Things.
Harmony Korine fired up some of my surviving synapses when he told the Venice Film Festival that streamer IShowSpeed is “the new Tarkovsky,” which is very, very dumb but not wholly incorrect.
These fests are part of an aging, celeb-driven industry — itself a microcosm of an aging, celeb-driven civilization — that has largely struggled (if not actively refused) to keep pace with the voices and energy of now.
For all their CrAaAaAzY ViBeZzZzZ, Noah’s vids feel viscerally and unapologetically like the present...
Which in and of itself is an accomplishment!
Butthole Surfers On The Deranged And Damaged 1980s — nice memory lane sesh to go along with the band’s new reissues. “We weren’t really giving it a whole lot of thought. Because thinking gets you into trouble.”
The Oral History Of Rich Gang’s Tha Tour Vol 1 — more reminiscing! RIP Rich Homie Quan. This piece is fantastic and I could read a whole version that’s just Birdman’s “client feedback.”
Zenana, “Witches” — rediscovered goth electro from 1980’s Cornwall.
New Orthodox, Freak Heat Waves, “Bottomed Out” — more creeper jams, from 2024 this time! Will dive into more FHW / Cindy Lee soon…
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! — having only seen it on mute in nightclubs, been wanting to give this weirdly unavailable cult classic / mood board a proper watch forever. Salute, Roku Channel.
Playlists updated…