Year Zero

I turn 27 today. I am spending the day in a split between reading Kurt Schwitters and riding my bike into the hills: between Merz and condor-circling. Come a few months from now, this blog will turn 1. I have a sneaking hope it will be far sneakier, more foul-thought-polemic-mouthed, and hungrier than I was then. But over the next few months, I will be giving it, so as to give myself, some sort of compulsory education, via a telescope in reverse and a shorter tether. Reason being that my book, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, coming out from zer0 Books next year...

(provisional cover my sister designed for me)

... needs to be written this summer. As such, expect a series of overinsistent working-throughs and reformulations on the apocalyptic question, starting from the initial Apocalyptic notes series written a while back.

First up on the fleshing out program/Lautréamontian dissecting table: salvagepunk, my coinage that seems to be taking on a life of its own (and going on to do more interesting things than my initial capture of a cultural tectonic).

To become of it here: a search for debris and montage beginnings, a sense of why Monty Python (in its Gilliam-inflection) returned to Dada/Surrealist collage aesthetics (and why those "originary" aesthetics were so concerned with a repurposing of the Victorian), the fake vintage t-shirt as the pseudo-apocalyptic freeze frame of the 90's, and how to dwell in thought in the junkyard without raising its filth to a futility of melancholic contemplation and era-naming.

To try to make out of the trashheap something utterly without value but that is, at the end of days, worth a damn.