Periodisation is fascinating; every critique presents a different starting point and this point gets earlier each time, with suggestions stretching back to Wordsworth, Swift, Dante, even Catullus. The danger, as Josipovici acknowledges, is that modernism is turned into a period of art history, a style. This is why I prefer the formulation of modernism as an event, one that will always exist, and with which artists must in some way contend. The event is, to use the term that Weber borrowed from Schiller, ‘the disenchantment of the world.’
David Winters and Anthony Brown get their heads around literary history.
Cabaret was a critical, award-winning success. It effectively evoked Berlin before Hitler’s rise to power and the precarious six years’ peace which preceded the outbreak of war in 1939. It seemed to bring to life the bitter depictions of Weimar Germany made by Otto Dix and Georg Grosz (the former’s Portrait of Journalist, Sylvia Von Harden is said to form the basis of a posed scene in the Kit Kat Klub during the film). Its poster, showing a bowlerhatted Sally Bowles, belongs with other iconic ones of that decade, such as those for Chinatown and The French Connection.
In the first years of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic work, the preoccupation with precipices, peripheral zones and abyss-edges propelled his itinerary, as though the experimentation of his work necessitated journeys to topographical frontiers at which previously habitual forms had expired, and the only way forward would now be via from-scratch innovations that treated existing technologies as scorched-earth detritus. As a result, Muybridge’s eye is always on the originating edge of vision and in interrogative movement, scanning terrains that are themselves in flux and newly-created.
Beckett did indeed have doubts about the stabilising anaphoric resources of language. He did feel the existential unease of both the nihilist and the Heraclitean, where his sympathy is with Holderlin’s lines, “…suffering humanity perishes and falls blindly from one hour to the other, like water dashed from crag to crag year after year, down into the unknown.” But it is through the resources of classical logic that the sorites has been understood as a problem of ignorance, and human fallibility. Beckett takes ignorance to be an essential aspect of the human condition. He gropes blindly towards the epistemic solution to the sorites rather than via deviant logics, nihilism or contextualism.
It is no surprise that Malcolm mentions Warhol. The influence of Chelsea Girls, and the Paul Morrissey films Flesh, Trash and (particularly) Women in Revolt, to which Warhol put his name, is clearly visible. Like Warhol and Morrissey, von Praunheim allowed his actors to improvise freely, often incorporating the results into the script, lending City of Lost Souls a similar feel to the films of Warhol, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger and other pioneers of queer American underground cinema.
In his vision of a ruined Cape Canaveral, Ballard presents the reader with a microcosm of the universe as a whole. In seeing the Earth from outer space, the astronauts—and thus, the viewers of those astronauts—understanding of time and space is dwarfed by the trauma of seeing the planet float in outer space. To see the planet from afar with all its flora and fauna, its pathos and drama, surrounded on all by sides the infinite stretch of cosmic stasis means sacrificing coherence for vertiginous contingency. 
The appeal of cosplay outside Japan is a perfect example of the transcultural boomerangs that characterize much of contemporary popular culture. As Japanese otaku of an older generation will tell you, cosplay, and the devotional fandom behind it, came from the United States: photos of costumed fans at North American sci-fi conventions, such as those revolving around Star Trek, appeared in magazines imported to Japan in the 1960s and 70s. Japanese readers adopted the practice, using characters from their homegrown anime and manga series. As the popularity of manga and anime spiked outside Japan, fast-evolving Internet access provided overseas fans first with a peephole and then a massive window onto what looked like an enticing made-in-Japan phenomenon.
The October 22 event not only presented to the viewers samples from Home’s latest book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, but also reasserted the author’s punk-yoga performative approach to reading-writing as the territory of contestation within the contemporary cultural arena: the complicity that is always already a form of resistance against utilitarian nihilo-cannibalism. Almost as an embodiment of the subtext of the virtual, compulsory anti-narrative, Stewart Home’s act was a reworking of the static-kinetic dialectic through postfuturist literary remixing.
I wish it had been me. Knocking on his door that fateful morning in early May. Don’t snicker. One of the few stints of gainful employment to which I’ve played slave to a weekly wage - was as a hotel maid in upstate New York. I needed cash and fast. I was underage but didn’t look it. But I had to cover my ass. I paid 20 bucks for a fake ID, which changed my address, date of birth and gave me a new name. “Betty Lou Harris” sounded like a nice piece of bible thumping Southern white trash. It had the ring of a lonely runaway in a Tom Waits song that glorifies diners and truck stops and the poor people that populate them.
I’ve made three films until now, Karma, You+Me=Love, and Mari-chan. I started getting into filming four years ago, because of Sion Sono, but before that I wasn’t into filmmaking, I wanted to draw manga. I met Takashi ”Bob” Okazaki, the creator of Afro Samurai, and he taught me the basics of Manga. So I was pretty serious about that. I don’t have the patience for comics though, it’s just too time consuming. I wanted Mari-chan to have a manga feel to it, that’s why the characters are so over-the-top and she keeps killing everyone but nothing happens to her.
