Frankie Boyle on the British government:
Boris Johnson, flapping about like a poorly-tethered bouncy castle, is supposed to serve as a distraction, a furball coughed up by a supervillain’s cat. He isn’t supposed to actually lead us through anything. We have a government that has no interest in governing up against an opposition uninterested in opposing. It feels like we’ve got Owen Jones, graffiti, and breakfast news against a ruling class, media, and virus that are broadly in agreement.
Mark Fisher in an old interview:
“What we have got with this digital culture now is this weird thing of hyper-ordinariness. You have got people who are done up to the nines but it isn’t like David Bowie where you are playing with some abstract aestheticisation. We have got people who have this uber ordinariness – it is a normative model: perfect teeth, right skin tone. An utterly conservative artificiality.”
Mark Fisher on Doctor Who:
“To look at the old Doctor; Who is not only to fail to recover a lost moment; it is to discover, with a deflating quotidian horror, that this moment never existed in the first place. An experience of awe and wonder dissolves into a pile of dressing up clothes and cheap special effects.”
As much as I’m enjoying the Twin Peaks anniversary stuff, UK-based newspapers seem to have forgotten – or decided it wasn’t important – that those of us in UK didn’t see the first episode until October. By then the big reveals were already being spoiled…
Frankie Boyle: Did you ever wonder what you’d be doing during an apocalypse?
Indeed, you have to wonder if the virus is so very different from extractive capitalism. It commandeers the manufacturing elements of its hosts, gets them to make stuff for it; kills a fair few, but not enough to stop it spreading. There is no normal for us to go back to. People sleeping in the streets wasn’t normal; children living in poverty wasn’t normal; neither was our taxes helping to bomb the people of Yemen. Using other people’s lives to pile up objects wasn’t normal, the whole thing was absurd. Governments are currently busy pouring money into propping up existing inequalities, and bailing out businesses that have made their shareholders rich. The world’s worst people think that everybody is going to come out of this in a few months and go willingly back into a kind of numbing servitude. Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.