“What is perhaps most remarkable about the rise of Nirvana — and the industry’s hastily assembled appellation “alternative rock” — is the belief by many at the time that it had come from nowhere…”
“The characters in ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains,’ ‘Smithereens’ and ‘Suburbia’ find in punk rock a convenient shorthand for authenticity, a posture which presages its eventual absorption into the very mechanisms it sets out to oppose.”
“There is little doubt that ‘Gabriel Over the White House’ was a test balloon of sorts, priming the audience for a discussion on the merits of the strongman leader, asking them what they would be willing to sacrifice in order to ameliorate the national plight.”
Vague Visages Short Stories #13: iamdifid: by D.M. Palmer (Sheffield, UK)
“In its own histrionic way, the ‘Maniac’ cycle presages a wave of reaction that would draw its power from the patriarchal fear of dispossession.”
“What saves ‘Pity,’ and the ‘Greek Weird Wave’ as a whole, from tipping into nihilism is the humanism at its core; it is the pessimism of thwarted hopes rather than the negative drive of cynicism.”
Vague Visages Short Stories #11: Beaming by D.M. Palmer (Sheffield, UK)
“Just as the internet unleashed the Slenderman, it is culpable in bringing forth another seductive monster who uses this technology to warp minds and sow division…”
“The ‘Predator’ franchise is a repository of the fears that plague the powerful. The context changes, but the fear persists — the fear that the conqueror may one day become the conquered.”
“As a primer on Laing, ‘Mad to be Normal’ offers nothing substantive; there is little attempt to explicate Laing’s ideas, or to pursue how he formulated those ideas while working in Glasgow’s mental hospitals…”
