Thursday, January 19, 2017

NERRRRRRRD! vol. 57


One of the things that I wanted to say with Jerusalem was that the imagination is still massively important. Use it or lose it. We should be able to create art and writing that is sufficient to these times. We should not have our culture frozen upon the spot in the way that it appears to be. It seems to me that we frisked hurriedly through the 1950s with all of the car tail fins like Buck Rogers rocket ships. We skipped through the space-age sixties with the moon landings and all of our science fiction. We were hastening through these decades in a hurry to get to our promised Jetsons’ future. Sometime around the mid-nineties, we suddenly realized that we were there. That this was the future and it was looking a lot more complicated and a lot different than the future we’d been imagining. And we froze. We didn’t know what to do. We decided that we would culturally march on the spot for the next twenty or thirty years. We would simply recycle the musical tastes of the previous few decades. Our films would largely be franchises based on characters that were created last century. We wanted that familiar twentieth-century stuff that we understood.

“The interior of the human head is infinite”: A Conversation with Alan Moore

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