Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

Plundered treasures, Zen-like spaces and inspiring women artists our selection of this years must-have titles

During the 1970s, Donna Stein a former curator at MoMA in New York served as art adviser to the Empress of Iran, guiding her selection of paintings and sculptures for the new Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Opened in 1977, it housed masterpieces by Van Gogh, Hockney, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Giacometti, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Moore, Magritte, Picasso, Warhol and more.

But the following year saw the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution, and since then the collection has been hidden away in vaults, barely seen by the public.

Today, its said to be the most important collection of modern art outside Europe and the United States, and worth several billion dollars. The Empress and I recounts Steins time spent building the collection, citing previously confidential correspondence with artists and dealers, while exploring the bond she formed with the Empress over a shared passion for art.

It has been said that Carlo Scarpas death caused by falling down a flight of concrete stairs in Japan was a poetic end to the life of an architect whose practice fused the grandiosity of his native Venice with the clean, modern lines of Japanese design.

RizzolisCarlo Scarpa: Beyond Matter(published 23 March)features new photographs by Lorenzo Pennati of Scarpas major projects in Venice, Verona, Bologna and the Dolomites, and pays special attention to the minute details of material, shape and light that he obsessed over in order to achieve his Zen-inspired visions. The volume has a postscript written by the architects son, Tobia Scarpa, who is in the process of designing the Scarpa Museum in Treviso.

The list of male artists for whom Isabel Rawsthorne modelled is almost a Whos Who of 20th-century art Jacob Epstein, Andr Derain,Picasso,GiacomettiandFrancis Baconamong them.

Out of the Cage: The Art of Isabel Rawsthorne, by Carol Jacobi.The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing, supported by Francis Bacon MB Art FoundationMonaco, in association with Thames & Hudson

She was married three times, counted Ian Fleming and Dylan Thomas as friends, and created black propaganda for the British government in the Second World War. She may also have been a spy. In Out of the Cage: The Art of Isabel Rawthorne (published 18 February), Carol Jacobi, Curator of British Art at Tate Britain, will cover all of those bases but also remind us of Rawsthorne the artist, in which capacity she had a long and productive career.

In 1797 Napoleons invading troops ripped Veroneses masterpiece, The Wedding Feast at Cana, off the refectory wall at the San Giorgio monastery. It was one of many paintings taken as spoils of war from Venice back to Paris.

As the French army cut a swathe through Europe, North Africa and the Levant, it continued to confiscate its enemies finest artworks and artefacts. Using the Veronese as a jumping-off point, Cynthia Saltzman investigates Napoleons Plunder(published 13 May), and how it helped turn the Louvre into both the greatest museum in the world and a monument to the emperors power.

Until the 20th century, women were largely ignored by European art history; even in the modern era, they had to fight to be taken seriously. One thing they were able to do was to sit down at an easel, pick up a mirror and paint themselves which is precisely what Catharina van Hemessen did in 1548, aged only 20.

She was the first artist of any gender to paint a self-portrait at the easel, says Jennifer Higgie, an art critic and author who also presents the Bow Down podcast on women in art history. In The Mirror and the Palette (published 18 March) she celebrates 20 women artists Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabeth-Louise Vige Le Brun, Los Mailou-Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil among them who defied the odds and broke taboos to present themselves, and their female perspective on the times they lived in, to the world.

Professor Jonathan Petropolous has spent his career engaging with the apparent paradox that Nazi leaders could perform acts of sheer barbarism yet still see themselves as men of culture. Grings Man in Paris (published 26 January) is a biography of Bruno Lohse (1911-2007), Hermann Grings art agent in Paris during much of the Second World War.

Bruno Lohse (second from right) leads Gring on a tour to select works of seized art with ERR Paris chiefvon Behr (second from left). (Bruno Lohse papers, authors collection)

The job entailed overseeing the systematic theft of thousands of artworks, largely from French Jews, and dispatching them to Germany, where Reichsmarschall Gring amassed an enormous personal collection. Lohse, who testified at the Nuremberg trials after the war and escaped conviction, was interviewed by Petropolous a number of times towards the end of his life.

Jaeger-LeCoultre has been a leader in micromechanics since 1844, when its founder, Antoine LeCoultre, invented a machine for measuring a thousandth of a millimetre. But the Swiss company is best known for the Reverso, a beautifully simple yet highly functional wristwatch with a case that flips to protect the delicate crystal, dial and movement within.

Created in 1931 for polo players, the elegant, rectangular Art Deco design captured the zeitgeist, and has continued to do so through more than 500 calibers, several hundred dials and a flipside variously decorated with enamel, engravings or gemstones indeed, the Duoface model turned the original into a two-time-zone watch.

Jaeger-LeCoultre: Reverso (published 12 February) marks the 90th birthday of the iconic timepiece, tracing its history through archive images and photography, with text by the historian, journalist and horological specialist Nick Foulkes.

The American Modernist architect Louis Kahn is best remembered as a maestro of light, an interest he claimed to have developed upon realising that the void between the columns of a Greek temple was just as significant as the space the columns filled. He brought this approach to more than 20 buildings, including Erdman Hall at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, the Sher-e-Bangla Nagar in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

For The Essential Louis Kahn(published 1 April), the architectural photographer Cemal Emden has shot 280 images covering each project inside and out, focusing her lens on Kahns juxtaposition of materials, repetitions of lines, and preoccupation with light as well as capturing the way in which his designs succeed whether in religious, governmental, educational or residential settings.

A timely contribution to the debate on cultural restitution, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes charts the story of the contested group of around 900 sculptures from the historic kingdom of Benin now held in the collection of the British Museum in London.

Phillips looks at everything from their creation beginning in the 16th century and their removal by the British in 1897, to their widely contested future, tapping a variety of sources and voices for insight into the controversy, among them the bronze casters of Benin City, museum directors and government officials.

Benin cockerel (from Antiquities from the City of Benin and from Other Parts of WestAfrica in the British Museum by Charles Read and Ormonde Dalton, 1899)

Rooted in fact, Loot addresses important questions about empire and the meaning of art, civilisation and culture, as the critic Clive Myrie aptly puts it. Phillipss succinct narrative also makes this a thrilling page-turner.

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With the world in and out of lockdown, the future of museums has never been so widely debated. As if on cue, The Art Museum in Modern Times (published 13 April), by renowned museum director Charles Saumarez Smith, considers the ways in which art museums have evolved over the past 80 years and what their future holds.

For this survey Saumarez Smith visited museums around the world, from MoMA in New York and Tate in London to the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Benesse House Museum on the Japanese island of Naoshima. He considers not only how architecture, innovation and funding have shaped the experience of art, but also the reasons behind the publics shifting attitudes towards visiting museums. Beautifully illustrated and filled with personal insights, it is a thoroughly enjoyable read.

In 1964, the Texan oil baron John de Menil and his art collector wife Dominique commissioned the abstract artist Mark Rothko to create a cycle of paintings for a chapel they were building in Houston, Texas. The artist set to work, mocking up a life-size model of the space in his Manhattan studio on East 69thStreet. He painted 14 colossal canvases that he hoped would be his answer to the Renaissance frescoes he had admired on his trips to Italy.

Tragically Rothko never saw the paintings in situ, committing suicide a year before the chapel was completed in 1971. Now, on the 50thanniversary of the buildings opening, Rizzoli has published this comprehensive guide to Rothkos final creation, which historians have described as an overwhelming synthesis of art and architecture. Rothko Chapel: An Oasis for Reflection (published 2 March) also features an introduction from the artists son, Christopher.

Numerous art historians have tried to pin down the enigma of Francis Bacon, searching for clues in the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father, how he came to terms with his homosexuality, as well as his debilitating asthma. Bacon himself rarely spoke about his art, for fear that his words would distract from his work.

Mark Stevens and his wife Annalyn Swan who shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for de Kooning: An American Master are the latest to have attempted the challenge, spending more than a decade researching their subject. The result of their dedication, Revelations (published 21 January), is a widely praised portrayal of a man who was both serious and loving, but as warped as his art. It has set a new benchmark for his biographers.

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Hot off the press what to read in 2021 - Christie's

As a 25th anniversary edition of Bridget Jones's Diary is published, authors and broadcasters reflect on their connection with the famous heroine.

Love her or loathe her, Bridget Jones is here to stay.

Fans of, and newcomers to, the 30-something chardonnay-swilling singleton can shortly bag a 25th anniversary edition of Bridget Jones's Diary, with added extracts from author Helen Fielding's early journalism and musings about Bridget Jones in the 21st century.

Millions of copies of the original, based on Jane Austen's novel Pride And Prejudice and evolved from Fielding's columns in The Independent newspaper, have been sold globally, spawning three further books and three film adaptations starring Renee Zellweger as Bridget and Colin Firth as Mark Darcy.

In the new book, Fielding explains: "Sometimes people claim that Bridget was the godmother of chick lit. But the truth is it wasn't just Bridget or me, it was zeitgeist. The fictional representation of single women had not caught up with reality."

Picture of Renee Zellweger. See PA Feature BOOK Bridget Jones. Picture credit should read: Ian West/PA. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature BOOK Bridget Jones.

So, do other authors feel that Jones is still relevant 25 years on?

'Daniel Cleavers are still in great abundance'

Author and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup reckons Bridget Jones's Diary is as relevant today as it was 25 years ago.

"It was a revolutionary text when it first came out. For anyone who was a young woman in the Nineties, it's like having a book equivalent of the soundtrack to your life, summing up the singleton lifestyle that so many of us were living," says Frostrup, author of Desire: 100 of Literature's Sexiest Stories. "There's nothing in this book, including her many attempts at creating the perfect relationship, that isn't relevant today.

"Much as we talk the talk, I don't think the world has changed dramatically on the romantic front, or in terms of people aspiring to find the right partner. And I think Daniel Cleavers are in great abundance. I don't really see what would be out of date in the book, apart from the smoking.

"It's such a relief to read about someone real rather than a prototype of what we think humanity should be like. If every single book about a woman was some prototype feminist saying all the right things and behaving in an absolutely admirable and militantly feminist way, it would be a dreary world."

She continues: "Increasingly, in these rather intolerant times, I think it's very good for us to be familiar with human foibles rather than constantly seeking human perfection.

"Bridget Jones's Diary is a totally timeless book. It's about all of the things that human beings will always aspire to: a connection with others, to find someone to love you, to find someone you can love back and to be the best person you can possibly be while at the same time recognising that we are all deeply flawed."

Picture of (left to right) Colin Firth, Helen Fielding, Renee Zellweger and Hugh Grant. See PA Feature BOOK Bridget Jones. Picture credit should read: Ian West/PA. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature BOOK Bridget Jones.

'Bridget was my work buddy'

Alexandra Heminsley was a junior press officer at Picador when a young woman called Bridget arrived for two weeks' work experience in 2000. Little did she know it was actually Renee Zellweger who was there to research the part of her alter ego.

"A smiley blonde woman who had a very posh accent and was quite amenable about helping out seemed completely normal," recalls Heminsley, bestselling author of Some Body To Love.

"Only the publicity director knew who she was. I'm sure she had quite a laugh watching me try to befriend Renee.

"We sat on opposite sides of the partition, so if I stood up I could see her desk. The phones diverted to me and to her. There was no social media then, you had to answer the phone. After two or three days, I started to hear her say, 'Hello, publicity,' just like me, and I wondered if she was taking the mickey.

"After she'd left, she wrote me a letter to thank me for looking after her, so I didn't feel like I'd been taken for a fool - and I had a laugh with my boss about it."

Heminsley continues: "The whole pressure around body image and counting and quantifying yourself the way those diary entries open with all the statistics, is definitely still relevant and is fuelled by social media.

"You can get your digital calorie counter and your Apple watch counting your steps. She would be counting so much more in those diary entries now, the likes, the steps..."

'People are still sleeping with their bosses and massively regretting it'

Picture of Renee Zellweger. See PA Feature BOOK Bridget Jones. Picture credit should read: Ian West/PA. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature BOOK Bridget Jones.

Vogue columnist Nell Frizzell, whose new book The Panic Years explores womanhood and motherhood, recalls that when Bridget Jones's Diary was first published in 1996, she was 12 and her mother wouldn't let her read it.

"She just wanted to protect me from the archetype of the neurotic self-hating woman. In a funny way that was a real feminist act on my mum's part. She knew I had enough baggage about my weight and my looks and didn't want me to have that exacerbated by the book.

"But I look back at Bridget Jones and the 'Smug Marrieds' and her feelings of being out of sync with so many people around her and of running out of time, and I completely understand. Bridget Jones is still really relatable because unfortunately, we have not changed the way men think about commitment and fertility, and therefore women are [often] still expected to do that heavy lifting on their own."

In terms of the workplace sexual harassment Jones puts up with, Frizzell says: "The #MeToo movement has shown that stuff is still happening in quite a lot of industries which we think of as aspirational and glamorous - film, TV, theatre. The way it's handled in the book and films, in a Carry On, bum-pinching, cleavage-ogling way, is now more uncomfortable with an audience.

"But a lot of people are still sleeping with their bosses and massively regretting it."

Book Cover Handout of Bridget Jones's Diary: 25th Anniversary Edition by Helen Fielding. See PA Feature BOOK Bridget Jones. Picture credit should read: Picador/PA. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature BOOK Bridget Jones.

'My daughter would find her terribly dated'

Bestselling novelist Fiona Gibson, whose new book The Dog Share is out in March, reflects: "Recently, I dipped back into the book which grew out of those columns, expecting it to be horribly dated. It is dated, of course; sexism abounds, Bridget tolerates it and believes her life is incomplete until she meets Mr Right.

"But so much of Bridget still resonates today - like that feeling that she must better herself and be a proper grown up. Back then it seems almost quaint that, in her world, this amounted to calorie counting while trying - and failing catastrophically - to limit her consumption of cigarettes and booze.

"Pre-Botox, fillers, Instagram and the Kardashian-influenced contouring make-up that grew from it, there's an innocence about Bridget's yearnings to be a better woman.

"My daughter, who's 20, would find her terribly dated. But her peer group is familiar with loneliness and finding solace and joy in the company of friends. I think we'll always warm to the idea of a young woman bumbling through life, cocking up regularly, making us feel better about our own screw-ups."

'I wish we could laugh at ourselves more'

Daisy Buchanan, host of You're Booked - a podcast dedicated to reading - whose debut novel Insatiable is published in February, read the books as a teenager. "I think it's relevant today. What's really sad is that we've become a lot more earnest and I wish we could learn to laugh at ourselves a little more.

"I think in this day and age the single Bridget would have Tinder binges with diary entries like: 'Must find sensible, functional man and not look at Tinder because it's all a disaster' and the next day would write: 'Hungover. Frantically swiping.'"

Bridget Jones's Diary (And Other Writing): 25th Anniversary Edition by Helen Fielding is published by Picador, priced 14.99. Available February 4.

Read the rest here:

Is Bridget Jones still relevant 25 years on? | News and Star - News & Star

Arts and CultureBooksLove her or loathe her, Bridget Jones is here to stay. Fans of and newcomers to the 30-something chardonnay-swilling singleton can shortly bag a 25th anniversary edition of Bridget Joness Diary, with added extracts from author Helen Fieldings early journalism and musings about Bridget Jones in the 21st century.

Thursday, 21st January 2021, 7:00 am

Millions of copies of the original, based on Jane Austens novel Pride And Prejudice and evolved from Fieldings columns in The Independent newspaper, have been sold globally, spawning three further books and three film adaptations starring Rene Zellweger as Bridget and Colin Firth as Mark Darcy.

In the new book, Fielding explains: Sometimes people claim that Bridget was the godmother of chick lit. But the truth is it wasnt just Bridget or me, it was zeitgeist. The fictional representation of single women had not caught up with reality.

So, do other authors feel that Jones is still relevant 25 years on?

Daniel Cleavers are still in great abundance

Author and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup reckons Bridget Joness Diary is as relevant today as it was 25 years ago.

It was a revolutionary text when it first came out. For anyone who was a young woman in the Nineties, its like having a book equivalent of the soundtrack to your life, summing up the singleton lifestyle that so many of us were living, says Frostrup, author of Desire: 100 of Literatures Sexiest Stories. Theres nothing in this book, including her many attempts at creating the perfect relationship, that isnt relevant today.

Much as we talk the talk, I dont think the world has changed dramatically on the romantic front, or in terms of people aspiring to find the right partner. And I think Daniel Cleavers are in great abundance. I dont really see what would be out of date in the book, apart from the smoking.

Its such a relief to read about someone real rather than a prototype of what we think humanity should be like. If every single book about a woman was some prototype feminist saying all the right things and behaving in an absolutely admirable and militantly feminist way, it would be a dreary world.

She continues: Increasingly, in these rather intolerant times, I think its very good for us to be familiar with human foibles rather than constantly seeking human perfection.

Bridget Joness Diary is a totally timeless book. Its about all of the things that human beings will always aspire to: a connection with others, to find someone to love you, to find someone you can love back and to be the best person you can possibly be while at the same time recognising that we are all deeply flawed.

Bridget was my work buddy

Alexandra Heminsley was a junior press officer at Picador when a young woman called Bridget arrived for two weeks work experience in 2000. Little did she know it was actually Rene Zellweger who was there to research the part of her alter ego.

A smiley blonde woman who had a very posh accent and was quite amenable about helping out seemed completely normal, recalls Heminsley, bestselling author of Some Body To Love.

Only the publicity director knew who she was. Im sure she had quite a laugh watching me try to befriend Rene.

We sat on opposite sides of the partition, so if I stood up I could see her desk. The phones diverted to me and to her. There was no social media then, you had to answer the phone. After two or three days, I started to hear her say, Hello, publicity, just like me, and I wondered if she was taking the mickey.

After shed left, she wrote me a letter to thank me for looking after her, so I didnt feel like Id been taken for a fool and I had a laugh with my boss about it.

Heminsley continues: The whole pressure around body image and counting and quantifying yourself the way those diary entries open with all the statistics, is definitely still relevant and is fuelled by social media.

You can get your digital calorie counter and your Apple watch counting your steps. She would be counting so much more in those diary entries now, the likes, the steps

People are still sleeping with their bosses and massively regretting it

Vogue columnist Nell Frizzell, whose new book The Panic Years explores womanhood and motherhood, recalls that when Bridget Joness Diary was first published in 1996, she was 12 and her mother wouldnt let her read it.

She just wanted to protect me from the archetype of the neurotic self-hating woman. In a funny way that was a real feminist act on my mums part. She knew I had enough baggage about my weight and my looks and didnt want me to have that exacerbated by the book.

But I look back at Bridget Jones and the Smug Marrieds and her feelings of being out of sync with so many people around her and of running out of time, and I completely understand. Bridget Jones is still really relatable because unfortunately, we have not changed the way men think about commitment and fertility, and therefore women are [often] still expected to do that heavy lifting on their own.

In terms of the workplace sexual harassment Jones puts up with, Frizzell says: The #MeToo movement has shown that stuff is still happening in quite a lot of industries which we think of as aspirational and glamorous film, TV, theatre. The way its handled in the book and films, in a Carry On, bum-pinching, cleavage-ogling way, is now more uncomfortable with an audience.

But a lot of people are still sleeping with their bosses and massively regretting it.

My daughter would find her terribly dated

Bestselling novelist Fiona Gibson, whose new book The Dog Share is out in March, reflects: Recently, I dipped back into the book which grew out of those columns, expecting it to be horribly dated. It is dated, of course; sexism abounds, Bridget tolerates it and believes her life is incomplete until she meets Mr Right.

But so much of Bridget still resonates today like that feeling that she must better herself and be a proper grown up. Back then it seems almost quaint that, in her world, this amounted to calorie counting while trying and failing catastrophically to limit her consumption of cigarettes and booze.

Pre-Botox, fillers, Instagram and the Kardashian-influenced contouring make-up that grew from it, theres an innocence about Bridgets yearnings to be a better woman.

My daughter, whos 20, would find her terribly dated. But her peer group is familiar with loneliness and finding solace and joy in the company of friends. I think well always warm to the idea of a young woman bumbling through life, cocking up regularly, making us feel better about our own screw-ups.

I wish we could laugh at ourselves more

Daisy Buchanan, host of Youre Booked a podcast dedicated to reading whose debut novel Insatiable is published in February, read the books as a teenager. I think its relevant today. Whats really sad is that weve become a lot more earnest and I wish we could learn to laugh at ourselves a little more.

I think in this day and age the single Bridget would have Tinder binges with diary entries like: Must find sensible, functional man and not look at Tinder because its all a disaster and the next day would write: Hungover. Frantically swiping.

See original here:

So would the modern, single, wine-slurping woman find Bridget Jones relevant 25 years on? - The Scotsman

Scarlett Sabet: So, a year since Catalyst, what are your thoughts?

Jimmy Page: Well, my thoughts on Catalyst being a living entity a year on: Im really pleased that we did it and relieved that we did a project that I had in my mind. I had it in my head, at various stages, the characters of the poems. To arrive where we arrived, with something that was really avant-garde, that had not been done before, was really thrilling. It was a catalyst, but also a milestone that others hadnt got to yet.

SS: I think thats it. You were so passionate and fired up about it and your vision was so clear and distinct, so although before we did it I couldnt fully comprehend it, I never questioned what you wanted to do. During the recording and production of the album I trusted what you were doing implicitly. We created a new language. Each poem on the album was an important landmark. With the exception of Rocking Underground, which I wrote in 2012, you were the first person to hear all the other poems.

JP: Yes, yes, thats a good point. I was the first person to hear all of those poems. But I also had the pleasure to hear you read on numerous occasions, in a variety of circumstances as well. So I got to feel these poems and to recognise the character of each one and certain cadences you would employ during your readings. I dont think you ever read one poem exactly the same, because you were breathing new life into it every night. All these things were registering with me. What I didnt want to do was what people assumed it would be: poems with music behind it. Well, thats what everyone would think. And I certainly didnt want to think in the normal sort of way. I wanted to think of it in another way altogether. Lets do what I know is right and that you know is right, so I presented you with something that, yes, will be musical, it will sound orchestral, but its all done with the human voice. And thats where we arrived at the territory of things that hadnt been done before.

SS: Yes, thats really well said.

JP: Rocking Underground, I heard you read that at your first poetry reading at Worlds End Bookshop in Chelsea and that really got to me. I thought, Wow, shes really living this, and not only that, but thats a really fine poem. It was a narrative and really interesting. From that point on, having seen your writing and your publications, I thought it was really great you self-published so you didnt have other people getting in the way of it.

SS: Well, that was thanks to you. I took your advice to self-publish.

JP: Rocking Underground was the first poem. I got you to record it on an old Sony cassette player and once youd done a performance you were happy with, then I got you to track it. Now, this is where the unexplained comes into the equations. Id used the cassette before, but on this occasion, it played back with this noisy, metallic sound, like an announcement on an underground tube, and, of course, it was written on a train.

SS: Yes, it was written on the Tube in London and I think there is a misnomer that Rocking in the title is a reference to rock music. It isnt. The word Existing could replace Rocking in the title and the meaning would be the same.

JP: Yes, Im pleased you said that. And what was played back on the cassette gave an atmosphere that gave an identity to the piece, almost like an invocation. I wanted you to double track it. I knew youd be able to do that. So there was a metallic-sounding voice, then a more natural sounding voice on top. So that was a great start and you could see that my ideas were a bit wacky. Interestingly enough, when Catalyst was released Phil Alexander played Rocking Underground on his Kerrang! Radio show and then he played a Led Zeppelin song afterwards and I thought that was really cool.

SS: It was Dazed And Confused.

JP: Well, thats even better, because thats the more avant-garde side of what Ive managed to create in the past, something akin.

SS: You really captured the atmosphere of that and, on a personal note, it was the first poem you saw me read at my first ever poetry reading, so in that way it was a landmark. Also, when I wrote it it was unusual compared to what I had previously written, so that poem was the beginning and you were at the beginning with me, in a way. Rocking Underground was also the title of my first book, which I self-published on your advice, to keep creative control. So I think we both knew this poem was going to be opening this album.

JP: The other poem I knew I wanted to try with you was "The Fifth Circle Of Hell. Every time I witnessed you read that poem, there was such a response, people holding their breath and then a spontaneous applause. I knew how strong it was. So for the recording of it, rather than putting too many textures on it, because of the vocal performance and what was being said and what was being covered in it, I wanted a more locked-in double tracking, not just the power of one voice saying this, but two voices riding all the way through, to make the message even stronger. And you felt at home with these experimental techniques.

SS: I remember so clearly writing it. It had been forming in my mind and then it all came out in one sitting.

JP: Yeah, you did do it in one afternoon. You were channelling, like it was inside you and it had to come out and it did come out. The first time you read it to me I was really impressed, Ive got to say.

SS: I was really excited to read it to you, because it was so different and really long and it was the narrative of what I wanted to say and I caught it in this rhythm. You were in a meeting in another part of the house and I remember once you had finished saying, I think Ive written something. It was a creative landmark for me.

"To arrive where we arrived, with something that was really avant-garde, that had not been done before, was really thrilling. It was a catalyst, but also a milestone that others hadnt got to yet."

JP: The thing is, its as relevant now as it was then.

SS: The tone of the poem on Catalyst is very aggressive. Its almost demonic.

JP: Yes, it is. It takes on a different character from how you read it. Cut Up was the third track we recorded and you came out with a way of reading it that I had never heard before.

SS: I realised that I needed to adapt the performance for the format: we were making a record. It wasnt a live poetry reading, where that poem becomes very impassioned.

JP: It was a totally different pacing and it was incredible, the whole hypnotic, mantric quality to it, and as you were doing it I knew I wanted to use an effect that I had used way back in the days of Led Zeppelin.

SS: On which track?

JP: Well, I did it on You Shook Me, which is at the end of the first album. You can hear it, but I used it differently on Catalyst. With Cut Up, I wanted it to be there, faintly in the background, and it to be an entity to creep in and become more and more audible as things go on, until at the end it builds and its almost like a conflict. Again, I knew this hadnt been done before with spoken word.

SS: That had started as a super-long draft of a poem, written by hand, and it got to the point it was almost 20 pages. I couldnt really stand it and felt I wanted to do something radical, destroy and dismantle what I had written, then rebuild it. So I remember I cut it up with scissors and because there was rhythm in the pre-existing phrases, the rhythm remained and it incorporated its own dark rhythm as well.

JP: It was remarkable and you were really on fire at this point. But this is how it was in the studio between the two of us, sparking off ideas.

SS: The actual recording was amazing and we were lucky to do it at home, being so comfortable, literally at home, and being with you: the trust between us, it made me brave. I wanted to meet you in that moment.

JP: And we did that. We arrived at that. To hear you do it in a different vein and rate and tempo, it was inspiring for me to come up with ideas. It was powerful.

SS: The first tracks are intense and really confront the listener and then Euphoric Kiss comes in and in the version on the album you can hear me laugh at the beginning. It was May when we recorded it, so after a long British winter, everything was coming alive again and I was filled with the joy of creating this piece of work together and its a poem I wrote as I was falling in love with you. Its a love poem, but defiant, and a code between us and it felt joyous to record it.

JP: Yeah, that was beautiful. This was one of the tracks where the poem alone would speak volumes. It needed just the naked honesty of it.

SS: Yes. When I'd perform that poem live, sometimes I'd improvise parts of it. The audience wouldn't know, necessarily, but you would.

JP: I think improvisation is the key to live performance, the people that know your work can see that you're not content to just go through the motions, that you're really hitting it every night in such a way that you're creating and changing the inflections of the poem, the song, whatever it is. Certainly within your poetry I could see you were capable of doing this and moulding things as you were performing them.

SS: You've created these phenomenal, electrifying live performances throughout your life. Are there some that stand out more distinctly to you, especially in terms of live performances, whether it be in a huge stadium or smaller venues or a studio?

JP: On occasion I've reviewed some work I've done in my own environment, from the home studio I had in the 1970s, where I had the facility to multitrack and layer guitars and other instruments as well. Whatever fires that off is the initial inspiration to create a piece. I'm sure it's the same as writing a poem. You get the inspiration for it and you build it and it takes shape.

SS: Yeah.

JP: And it's not necessarily a really long process. It's something that's really coming out. So under the circumstances of a live situation, I've heard versions of Dazed And Confused, for example, four nights a row on tour and I was surprised just how much improvisation there was each night, which I didn't repeat on any other night. To hear them decades later and hear what the mindset was... It was just allowing things to come through. They're unreleased.

SS: Do you have specific memories of when you've walked off stage after a performance or improvisation and just known, "Wow. That one was really..."

JP: Well, I particularly went on stage to do that sort of thing, so even though there was a set list, just walking up the steps to go on stage I knew what the numbers were going to be and I knew that there were little signs for the improvising sections that meant to the other, "Right this is going to change gear," and it was going to be something new, so they were just going to have to pay attention to these signs that would occur. So these whole passages would come out and then I would change it again into another one and that's really living by the seat of your pants, but I really enjoyed doing it and fortunately I was able to. I've really built my whole reputation on improvisation and spontaneous music. I can appreciate it in somebody else, certainly you. I could see you were breathing new life into poems every night.

SS: Possession was very intimate. I also adapted the performance of that piece. I wanted it to be intimate and its sensual and spiritual. I guess thats why its just presented as its recorded.

JP: Yes. Then it goes into And My Lungs Fill Ecstatic Song.

SS: Oh, yes! Well, that was written when I was walking by the River Thames in Sonning. I was inspired by the landscape. I wrote some notes. It wasnt until we went away that December that I started experimenting with those lines and cut them up, rearranged the structure. In that poem I also wanted to evoke almost the muscle memory of writing the poem, the feeling in my legs and the adrenaline, trying to capture it in lines. In poetry readings, I accelerate in the last verse, but in the production of this track you really accomplished what I wanted to convey. But we didnt even have a conversation about it. You just knew and you did.

JP: Given the way you read this, it felt quite mantric and, as you say, theres a pacing to it. I definitely wanted to bring all of that out, and make it quite orchestral in the way that it starts and develops and really pulsates. It has such a dynamic to it. And this is really what I meant when I said the album wouldnt be with instruments, but it will sound orchestral and going into areas no one has done before.

SS: Ah, and then the next is For Jack, which is a love poem or eulogy for Jack Kerouac. I started writing it in the months leading up to The Town And The City Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts, which is Kerouacs birthplace and where he is buried. So the poems inaugural reading was in Kerouacs birthplace. Im so moved by his work. He was so sensitive and spiritual. He tapped into something in the zeitgeist, expressed it in this new freeform way and he got huge praise and ridicule for it and he bore the brunt of both. Hes always affected me and I wanted to try to capture him. The word You is the opening of each line, addressing Kerouac directly. When I read it at City Lights, Peter Marvelis said that I had really captured [Kerouac] and what had happened to him. I think we knew we had to include this poem as part of Catalyst, because this album is kind of in the spirit of the beat writers.

JP: There was this whole movement going on in the 1950s and 1960s in literature and in music.

SS: What was the first poem that stood out to you as a young person ? I remember at primary school age, under ten, I remember Robert Louis Stevenson poems and then, after that, when I was older, WB Yeats and Coleridge. Then I discovered Bob Dylan, then Allen Ginsberg then Kerouac.

JP: Yes, I was introduced to poetry when I was at school and I realised reading poetry in the class room, en masse, that it went into another dimension and then I appreciated the metre of it, the construction. I was quite taken with the Victorian Romantic poets, Byron, Keats, Shelley. When I was in my mid-teens, I paid a lot of attention to Christopher Logue. He released an EP called Red Bird in 1959. I absolutely adored it. I adored what they were doing. It was actually jazz, with Logue reading his poems, but it wasn't freeform, it was really constructed and really exciting.

SS: I remember when you played me that.

JP: I was really impressed with the way that he read his poems, sometimes really fast and other times in a melancholic way. It meant a lot to me when I heard it. I took it in, because it was someone who had done something new and not only that it was absolutely amazing and not many people knew of it. And, of course, Christopher Logue performed at the International Poetry Incarnation in 1965 at the Royal Albert Hall.

SS: You were there that night.

JP: I was there. Allen Ginsburg performed that night with some of the other San Francisco beat poets. I had come across Howl and read it and when many people read that poem it changed their life and I was one of them.

SS: Same.

JP: Burroughs and Gysin experimented with cutup and I know they had done work at the BBC, literally cutting up analogue tapes and putting them together. Thats something I considered to be really moving things in a different direction from what they had been before. That was exactly how I thought about music. And at the same time, you had Krzysztof Penderecki, his ode to Threnody, to the victims of Hiroshima. That texture of the orchestra had such an effect on me, all through my work, in Led Zeppelin and what I was trying to do with the bow and sonic waves and my ideas for what we did on Catalyst. I also liked The New Music a later album of Penderecki. Also during that time in the late 1950s early 1960s, I discovered electronic music records by John Cage, Luciano Berio, Ilhan Mimaroglu. It all had such an effect, these textures. And what they were doing in musique concrte is what I feel we were doing with Catalyst, an extension of that. The whole adventure of Catalyst was done over a few days and Im really thrilled we did it in such a compact amount of time. We spent exactly the right time on each thing, nothing was laboured. It was all so enthusiastic and inspirational.

SS: Yes, it really was. We knew where we were coming from with this project and your passion for it was like a suit of armour. Im so proud of what we created. I always want to do something experimental and the one thing Ive always tried to do is keep challenging myself, push myself creatively, not keep doing the same thing over and over again. To stay alive and connected as an artist I think its important to keep being brave and do different things.

JP: Yes, thats absolutely the way to go about ones work.

SS: Youve never played it safe and gone down the commercial route.

JP: I think its more satisfying to throw down the gauntlet to yourself, take on the challenge and then come out with something where youve really pushed yourself. To actually do something unique and new. Les Paul said to me, You know what you can do? Same picture, different frame. So you never lose the main part of your character, thats recognised, but you adjust the framing of the picture.

SS: Wow. Youve definitely done that.

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Jimmy Page and Scarlett Sabet in conversation about their spoken word album, Catalyst - British GQ

In refusing to be neither something different nor more of the same, Back to the Future IIs re-filming technique within the original via new VistaGlide technology offered rather a remix of the Back to the Future that notoriously played with our expectations of a sequel forever. What accrues over time as we look back on its archive, and how can we avoid nostalgia in this history? Its an argument for visiting both films on the 35th anniversary of the original. Yet the sequels 1989 vision of The Future also contains a cultural critique that betrayed a very contemporary self-awareness of countercultural downfall since the date of the original films October 21, 1985 conclusion. Namely the rebellious cyberpunk movement that had mainstreamed by that year within the hopeful 80s spaces of science fiction communities, arcades, MTV, comics, graphic novels, and British public television had come to a grim demise. The fate of popular cyberpunk since Back to the Future can offer us something perhaps more precious: a modern-day lesson for our own failing technoconsumerist times. As the 2020 release of a cinematic cyberpunk video game starring Keanu Reeves illustrates continuing interest in and criticisms of the stagnation of the genre, revisiting the cyberpunk archive of Back to the Futures 1989 might help us come back to a future beyond the technologized noise of social and cultural nostalgia.

* * *

For many who watched the film Back to the Future II for October 2015s heavily pressed Back to the Future Day, David Ehrlichs assertions in Rolling Stone probably rang true: The year 2015 of Zemeckiss film was uncannily prescient as an experience that tends to look a lot like the present by the time it arrives. His claim that the future in retrospect has always been that way refers to explosive cycles of new consumer technology, like the Model T and the iPhone, falling in step with internalized narratives of progress that always seem to become overcommodified, overblown, and boring for us in the future-realized. On to the next thing, then: the rose gold iPhone Rebecca Mead described (as perverse) in her New Yorker article that year, the real-life-fantasy pair of self-lacing Nikes, that temporary sense of social inclusion progress even for a price.

The half-life of journalism as a novelty itself is affirmed in just how swiftly the viral relevance of Right or Wrong predictions in a Blockbuster sci-fi film can slip into Who Cares territory. Ushering a vision of the future with tech-equipped, white-collar criminals, a deserved poverty loser narrative in the future McFly lineage, and 24/7 work telecommunications, one could argue (futilely) that Back to the Future II predicted a dystopian 2015 wed certainly already arrived at. However, to the 80s-trained eye, Back to the Futures hyperconsumerist future was more than just an uncanny prediction of what technocapitalism may always do to culture, or what cultures may always do with their technocapitalism. Back to the Future II was also a 3.5-year reflection when it was released. It picked up exactly where the 1985 original left off, with Martys gee-whiz skateboarding character having successfully wired postwar Pax Americana nostalgia and new-tech savvy to resolve the American Dreams meritocratic and global technology anxieties. In hacking time as an ultimate soft technology (to quote SF writer Ursula K. LeGuin), perhaps the original had repaired the accelerating, post-industrial rift in lasting relationships and generational connection emphasized in Alvin Tofflers then-popular Future Shock, and perhaps in this endless loop of rapid late-20th-century technological change and cybernetic threat the sequel could do it again.

In refusing to be neither something different nor more of the same, Back to the Future IIs re-filming technique within the original via new VistaGlide technology offered rather a remix of the Back to the Future that notoriously played with our expectations of a sequel forever. What accrues over time as we look back on its archive, and how can we avoid nostalgia in this history? Its an argument for visiting both films on the 35th anniversary of the original. Yet the sequels 1989 vision of The Future also contains a cultural critique that betrayed a very contemporary self-awareness of countercultural downfall since the date of the original films October 21, 1985 conclusion. Namely the rebellious cyberpunk movement that had mainstreamed by that year within the hopeful 80s spaces of science fiction communities, arcades, MTV, comics, graphic novels, and British public television had come to a grim demise. The fate of popular cyberpunk since Back to the Future can offer us something perhaps more precious: a modern-day lesson for our own failing technoconsumerist times. As the 2020 release of a cinematic cyberpunk video game starring Keanu Reeves illustrates continuing interest in and criticisms of the stagnation of the genre, revisiting the cyberpunk archive of Back to the Futures 1989 might help us come back to a future beyond the technologized noise of social and cultural nostalgia.

ABCs Max Headroom series

With aspirations for technologys potential for redemption against the symptoms of late global capitalism, Sabine Heuser notes that cyberpunk works would typically pit the individual against [a] conspiracy of corporations and capital inflicting conformism, surveillance, powerlessness, urban ruination, and a loss of authentic culture in their world. Cyberpunk reached for a radical transcendence of this technology-assisted oppression through liberatory notions like cyberspace, bodymod, hacking, subversion, novelty, fragmentation, and hybridity. These creative notions superseded the concern for current technological limits. A cyberpunk scholar, Heuser writes:

Emerging from the stories is a typical do-it-yourself attitude when confronted with high technology. There are no owners manuals, no respect for the intended function of the technology. Technology is turned against its original design or its intended use, becoming a vehicle for creative (and sometimes crude) intervention.

Starting within a literary movement that Samuel Delaney called an SF dialogue that had run its course by 1987, this characteristic cyberpunk ethos of aspirational hacking through and beyond available technology also emerged throughout popular visual cultural productions of the 80s a sort of cultural leaking of social theory. Much like Docs difficulty finding fuel for his hacked DeLorean, cyberpunk imaginaries of technological change sometimes struggled in the real world for the means of their aspirational cyber-aesthetic. The cyberpunk comic Shatter by Peter B. Gillis and Mike Saenz, for example, became the very first comic drawn with a computer mouse in 1985. Interviews for the bound 20th-anniversary compilation of Shatter describe an innovative, tedious, and costly process of making computer-generated art for the comic on a first-generation Apple Macintosh, pixel by pixel, then hand coloring the black-and-white printouts from a dot matrix. Shatters plot went further down the necropolitical corporate media rabbit hole than even its 1985 cyberpunk fellow, Max Headroom; The Shatter comic featured an evil media corporation that rather than cyber-copying journalists is in the regular, profitable business of harvesting genetic-based talent through mercenary murder. Cybernetic threat against the individual was a palpable anxiety that pervaded popular cyberpunk, and concerned its own forms of the systems . . . capable of receiving, storing and processing information that 80s cyberneticists sought to study for control purposes. We might find such anxiety in Martys race to resist the erasure of his very existence through quick-witted action scenes, while the circular causal and feedback mechanisms Marty must continuously maneuver seem to make movie magic of the foundational concerns of postwar cybernetics.

You broke it! . . . Wow! Look at him go! Marty (re)invents skateboarding in Back to the Future.

Not everyone had the custom tech apparatus of Zemeckis in Hollywood to realize their creative vision (in this case, for his refilming technique), and the Apple Macintosh was it in 1985 personal computer technology. Shatter artist Mike Saenz made obvious efforts to loosen up the limited state of contemporary computer graphics in 1985, layering dynamic mouse-drawn compositions with visible mixed-media colorations of watercolor, pencil, pastel, and gouache. Customer feedback in the inside cover of issue No. 2 met a range of reactions. A self-professed computer hacker and comics collector offered appreciation for how excellent the computer art was for its time (and worth the expensive issue price). A lengthy complaint applauded Saenzs bold attempt to make art with the Mighty Mac, but criticized the primitive quality of the emergent graphics, and the unoriginal similarities to Blade Runner, as being a comics turn off for even a fellow Macintosh owner. For one reason or another, Saenz soon left the Shatter project to work on an Iron Man graphic novel. His valiant hacking practice for Shatter was abandoned by the replacement artist in favor of traditional comic art that was first hand drawn and then digitized an easier and more manipulable visual process at the time, but was it still a cyberpunk?

Hacking, hybridizing, fragmenting, struggling for a cyberpunk aesthetic beyond the technologically possible, these proto-digital qualities of cyberpunk showed up again in the once wildly successful and transatlantic Max Headroom media franchise that appeared in scenes of Back to The Future II. As documented by Bryan Bishop in his The Definitive Oral History of 1980s Digital Icon Max Headroom, this pioneering transmedia franchise started as a UK cable Channel 4 movie on the politics of corporate media cyberspace what writer George Stone called the landscape of television. The satirical character Max Headroom, a computer-generated alter-ego entity reconstructed from the fragmented consciousness of a comatose journalist, would go on that same week to lambast media culture by hosting music videos on a regular show on Channel 4. By the second season in 1986, the roasting would include celebrity interviews and a joint airing between Cinemax and Channel 4, and thus began a wild rollercoaster of success for the franchise ending in a nostalgic, self-effacing flop in Back to the Future II.

In simultaneously making Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future and The Max Headroom Show, creators George Stone, Annabel Jankel, and Rocky Morton realized that the graphics capacity needed to visually create their vision of the titular cybernetic character of the story was not only technologically impossible but years down the line. As a result, the hacking carried out to achieve the novel, computer-generated cyber-look of Max Headroom beyond 1985 computer art capabilities was a hybrid production including hours of makeup and prosthetics on actor Matt Frewer, fiberglass costuming, stolen rotating CGI background graphics from a milk commercial, and the non-digital, glitchy stutters and hiccups of the video editing room.

True to the avant-garde identity of cyberpunk described by Heuser, the premiere of The Max Headroom Show on UK cable Channel 4 featured a lack of credits and an immediate slippage between reality and fiction recalling Orson Welless unannounced radio premiere of War of the Worlds. According to Bishops interview with Max Headroom producer Peter Wagg:

There were no opening titles. There were no credits for anybody . . . it was just that satellite chssssssss, snow and buzz. And all of a sudden, Max was there. Like, bang! And hes talking in German, and hes telling this joke about lederhosen all in German, hes roaring with laughter during the whole thing, and then the first music video we played was a German music video. And then Max in English: And this weeks award for the worst TV commercial goes to . . . and a commercial break. We had no idea what the first commercial would be. . . . Then at the end, it just went chssssssss and to [static] again. It was like youd woken up in Eastern Europe and turned the television on, and youre watching some weird station that you dont understand, and then it suddenly is cut off and gone.

In this case, Max Headrooms fictional slippage into perceived Iron Curtain shadow worlds in Western media space and subversive cultural commentary marked a revealing glitch for the viewer, one that evaded the typically opaque programming of popular and political mainstream media. No doubt it helped that Max Headroom was premiering on Channel 4, a station of the later public media movement that aimed to provide an outlet for experimental, noncommercial content.

Penn & Teller perform magic on a Cinemax-only variety show concurrent to the 1987 ABC Max Headroom series.

Bishop notes that even after Max Headroom went on to be adopted as an MTV host and cyberpunk spokeshead for Coca-Cola commercials, and was appropriated to become U.S. network televisions very first cyberpunk series, the creative team employed guerrilla tactics with late scripts and copious ad-libbing at ABC to make sure edgy, countercultural satire about the media industry was still getting through. In fact, ever since Max Headroom had won a BAFTA for graphics in 1986, the joke had been on the larger industry as well, as it had all been a hack, a proud fake that used essentially no computer graphics to gain the critical acclaim. The fact that Max Headroom was hackwork didnt matter so much as achieving the aesthetic cyberpunk aspiration or maybe it did; amidst great commercial success, actor Matt Frewer describes the Max Headroom creative teams infiltration campaign of mainstream media as aspiring to get away with things. It likely didnt help pro-industry morale that the lead creators had been pushed out amidst lawyer battles as the wildly popular franchise moved to ABC, and that the show was soon given a graveyard slot.

The balance Max Headroom struck between a cyberpunk ethos and the massive budgets, corporate controls, and ratings obsessions of network media would not last long. Bishops oral history of the show tells of a swift downfall when the show was cancelled in mid-production of the second season. Perhaps the boundary pushing became vulnerable and public interest fell having sensed the obsolescence in Max Headrooms corporate integration, its multimillion-dollar expense account used to recreate props that wed found in skips and . . . in old junk shops and things (as original co-creator Annabel Jankel recalled). Perhaps the audiences attracted to big-budget productions didnt get it in the intersection where cult counterculture and corporate media had crossed the streams. Ultimately, the proud cyberpunk fake had become a commercial phony to network media, succumbing to a wider cultural phenomenon of cyberpunk and punk that Heuser calls fatal appropria[tion].

80s Caf scene in Back to the Future II

Sell-out is too strong a term. Pioneering analog-to-digital cyberpunk media of the 80s like Shatter and Max Headroom may have eventually appeared to fail in the ways they separated the cybersoul from commercial corpus and the franchise from founding vision, but this is because, as cyberpunk scholar Takayuki Tatsumi points out, the age of technoconsumerism and its global instabilities especially those perceived in the economic rise of 1980s Japan had already arrived. However globalizing media processes helped to popularize avant-garde art and social critique, it also chewed up a body of creatives that public structures like Channel 4 had aimed to support by prioritizing independent producers. The scenario highlights cyberpunks cyberlibertarian streak as a failed fantasy of freedom, one still unable to reconcile the weak position of cognitive and digital labor. Yet it also reminds us that, as with Orson Welless struggles to fund his work, the microhistories of cultural producers may have been altogether different if crowdsourcing platforms had been available to tip the balance of fatal appropriation. The question may be a timeless one: Can the technology that enslaves also liberate?

Back to the Future IIs version of 1985 is worth rewatching just to revisit a constellation of cutting-edge Max Headroom-style icons encapsulated in a deflating sense of the decades obsolescence. In the film, these animations play on tvs that no longer serve music videos or celebrity interviews, but instead service food orders in a sad 80s Nostalgia Cafe. This tired, commoditized cyberpunk is drained not only of its radical roots, but also of its appropriated commercial glamour. In a hilariously cutting scene, AI versions of Reagan and the Ayatollah battle furiously in cyberspace over screen control for Martys Pepsi (notice, not Coca-Cola) product placement order. Its politics and rapid technocultural overturn as usual, and why should the hypermediated icons of MTV fare any differently? Appearing two years after the cancellation of the Max Headroom series, this franchise cameo of sorts in Back to the Future II signals an already palpable and hungry, but bitingly sarcastic, contemporary nostalgia for itself a nostalgia for the techno-utopian zeitgeist of 80s counterculture that commercialism had gobbled up and cast aside by 1989.

Was this signaling intentional, or part of a machine built on metafictionality teasing another new and upcoming next best thing? Interestingly enough, the 80s nostalgia cafe pokes fun at a film franchise steeped in its own decade of hypermediated nostalgia, from cyberpunk film noir, to the classic Westerns that Mark Fisher saw recycled in Star Wars, to the postwar romanticism of Back to the Future itself. Consider the way the title graphics for Back to the Future recall those of The Stunt Man, a 1980 film starring Peter OToole that captured a feverish paranoia of the pervasive conflation between media image and reality, exacted through the gods eye control of the Hollywood director. Takayuki Tatsumi similarly identified this metafictional power of media circulation in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now!, which echoed the real-life entanglement between news coverage of Vietnam and the influence of Hollywood war movie nostalgia. On to the next umpteenth Jaws sequel in Back to the Futures future of 1989, then (a reference made all in good jest, as Spielberg was Zemeckis mentor and friend).

In this sense, The Future in Back to the Future functions as a film candidate of the slipstream genre, something between mainstream and science fiction that William Gibson described as works that play with representational conventions . . . not creat[ing] new worlds but quot[ing] them often out of context . . . turning them against themselves a commercial-countercultural War of the Worlds, indeed. Metafiction, as Cory Doctorow explains, is just one of the estrange[ment] tools in the arsenal of slipstream. Between MTV and arcade, these filmic cyberpunk quotations of the Mainstream of Recent 80s Past also mark the future year 2015 in Back to the Future as, in fact, a historical looking back, a virtual space for pondering what the heck had already gone wrong with their generations popularized counterculture, rather than a speculative prediction waiting for us to weigh in on for accuracys sake. And it does so successfully in a very tenuous space that Zemeckis continually asserts a right to occupy, in the space between the avant and the popular, before the demise into the consumer culture archive.

Nostalgia, a product of longingly looking back with a sense of present social loss or decline, comes to us as a fiction, the totalizing, dreamy flattening of a real and complex past that fails to capture all the ironies, the holes and inconsistencies, and the dreams deferred of that time period. Yet I suspect that viewers of Back to the Future II caught the cyberpunk joke, the hack, the proud fake of a disillusioned nostalgia, well recognizing the commodity failure of their not-yet-fully-realized counterculture of 1985 before its technofruition or maybe just understanding from the mainstream that it was all a great, big commercial phony after all. Perhaps the saddest, most dystopian thing about Back to the Future II is that the only counterculture cyberpunks left to be found are a bunch of annoying rich kids, sporting fetishized high-tech gizmos, and hanging around at a shopping plaza. Thats something for us all to keep in mind as we stop what were doing to run out and buy that new iPhone to replace that boring old rose gold one, of course.

Francis Ford Coppolas cameo in his own film, Apocalypse Now!

SF writer Samuel Delaney argued in his Black to the Future interview with Mark Dery that cyberpunks aspirations to subvert the official uses of media and technology could only fall short over time as a pervasive misreading of an interim period of urban technoculture. As our 20th-century relationships to the material hardware and inner workings of technology grew increasingly remote, our technology [became] more and more like magic; The spells and incantations of hacking and urban bricolage across consumer stuff could never amount to transformative agency in the production and flow of technological culture. Neither could cyberpunk maintain the naivete of ironic anger toward this power imbalance implied in William Gibsons infamous phrase The street finds its own use for things. The reality, for Delaney, was that cyberpunks DIY ethos could neither get inside the portable black boxes of its time, nor the white boxes of the computer hacker class.

The late Mark Fisher has pointed out in popular music how a decrease in access to viable cultural production has actually influenced nostalgic traces of lost futures in 21st-century music music that only sounds new because it emulates the still-possible sense of the future in the old. Derived from Derridas hauntology of media, these are the aesthetic traces of failed futures futures that, in fact, no longer feel like they could ever arrive; The future is no longer what it was. Perhaps this is why recurrent cyberpunk media like Cyberpunk 2077 invites repetitive criticisms of the genres romanticized sociocultural as well as stylistic stasis. And so we find ourselves returning again and again to this historical moment in global medias simultaneous emergent possibility and dystopian impossibility as if this time, enhanced with the latest graphics and social contexts, we might finally find that peripheral exit from its trajectory. Yet Martys kind of hyperactive, on-the-fly ingenuity, hopeful as it is of an unassimilable emerging creative class within the cyberpunk moment, seems as much a romanticism of something we havent reached. As Samuel Delaney points out, without romanticism we might not have the initiative to explore whats on the other side of anything. Somewhere amidst the nostalgia, Im sure, is the leakage of an updating social theory.

Overall, Delaney has made the case that science fiction is most effective when its not at the center of anything. Its unclear whether he meant science fiction as a social forum, art form, or vehicle for the speculative; The trouble with the center is that it allows no room for moving. From Zemeckiss quotations of the Safety Last! clock scene in the original and Spielbergs Jaws in the sequel, to the hacking of his own films iconic scenes through innovative technology, perhaps the Back to the Future franchise most asserted one thing in the face of fatal appropriation flops and rapid commodity turnover: the influence of the cultural archive, and the power of creative acts to endure and that the best part of the joke, the hack, is when youre in on it, of course.

The shark may always still look fake in the emergent technology of the future, but theres nothing quite like striving to create something new in this world.

This Time Its REALLY, REALLY personal.

* * *

Bibliography

Bishop, Bryan. n.d. The Definitive Oral History of 1980s Digital Icon Max Headroom. The Verge. Accessed January 7, 2021. https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8285139/max-headroom-oral-history-80s-cyberpunk-interview.

Bonner, Frances. 1992. Separate Development: Cyberpunk in Film and TV. In Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, by Eds. George Slusser and Tom Shippey. University of Georgia.

Dery, Mark. 1994. Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, Ed. Mark Dery. Duke University Press.

Doctorow, Cory. 2006. Slipstream Science Fiction Anthology Defies Genre Conventions. BoingBoing, June 14.

Ehrlich, David. 2015. Back to the Future Part II: Welcome to the Present. Rolling Stone, October 21. https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/back-to-the-future-part-ii-welcome-to-the-present-191700/.

Fisher, Mark. 2012. Star Wars Was a Sell-out from the Start. The Guardian, November 1.

Fisher, Mark. Vol. 66, No. 1, Fall 2012. What Is Hauntology? Film Quarterly, 16-24.

Gerovitch, Slava. 2002. From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. MIT Press.

Gillis, Peter andMike Saenz. 2006.Shatter. A i T/Planet Lar.

Hansen, Miriam. No. 56, 1992. Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer. New German Critique43-73.

Heuser, Sabine. 2003. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction. Rodopi.

Hobson, Dorothy. 2008. Channel 4: The Early Years and the Jeremy Isaacs Legacy. I. B. Tauris.

Holland, Norman. n.d. Richard Rush, The Stunt Man (1980). A Sharper Focus.Accessed January 14, 2021.https://www.asharperfocus.com/Stunt.html.

LeGuin, Ursula K. n.d. A Rant About Technology. Ursula LeGuin Archive. Accessed January 7, 2020. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html.

Mead, Rebecca. 2015. The Semiotics of Rose Gold. The New Yorker, September 14. Accessed January 7, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-semiotics-of-rose-gold.

Saenz, Mike and Peter B. Gillis. 1986.Shatter, No. 2. First Comics.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. 2006. Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Duke University Press.

Toffler, Alvin. 1970. Future Shock. Random House.

Umpleby, Stuart. 1982; revised 2000. Definitions of Cybernetics. American Society for Cybernetics. Accessed January 8, 2021. https://asc-cybernetics.org/definitions/.

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A Brief History of Slip and Failure: Cyberpunk and the Headroom for Nostalgia in Back to the Future - Bright Lights Film Journal

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it was announced that VH1 had cut its ties with the production company Big Fish Entertainment.

Following the success of Love & Hip Hop: New York in 2011, it wasnt long before VH1 was willing to see whether a spin-off series would perform just as well, which later brought about the Atlanta edition in June 2012 starring the likes of Mimi Faust, Joseline Hernandez, and Stevie J.

It turned out that the latter show proved to be more popular with fans, with ratings at one point surpassing 3.5 million viewers per week, consequently giving producers the idea to produce another string of spin-offs: Hollywood in 2014 and Miami in 2018.

But in June 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it was announced that VH1 had cut its ties with the production company Big Fish Entertainment, leading many people to believe that the LHH franchise -- once starring rap superstar Cardi B -- could potentially be over but does it still stand a chance of coming back?

Things remain up in the air about the franchises future following the news that VH1 and Big Fish Entertainment are no longer in business together.

VH1, which is owned by ViacomCBS, announced in a statement that its relationship with the production firm had come to an end, meaning that all of its shows produced by the company are pretty much over and done with.

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We have decided to end our relationship with Big Fish Entertainment and will be producing our shows in house at this time, the statement read. "We thank Big Fish for their past contributions and wish them the best.

According to sources for The Hollywood Reporter, a decision to cut ties with Big Fish came about following the controversy concerning its A&E show, Live PD, which raised a lot of eyebrows and nationwide protests over its handling of footage from a traffic chase in March 2019 which resulted in the death of Javier Ambler.

While the chase was never shown on TV, the story in itself drew enough attention for viewers to ask those whod been watching the show to boycott the series.

In the midst of the Black Live Matter movement, while ViacomCBS isnt responsible for other shows that Big Fish producers on other networks, the scandal was big enough for the company to know that cutting ties with the company was probably the wisest decision they couldve made.

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To make matters worse, however, Big Fish also produced VH1s Black Ink Crew, meaning that two of the networks biggest franchises were wiped after a decision was made not to move ahead with new seasons.

In October 2020, however, executive producer and the shows creator Mona Scott-Young spoke out about the situation concerning Big Fish and ViacomCBS, admitting that while there had been a lot of back and forth between both firms regarding the future of two of its franchises, there was still a chance that all of the Love & Hip Hop shows, including New York, would be returning.

Its believed that Viacom has struck a deal to take over production of the aforementioned reality shows, which Young appeared to confirm in her interview.

The network has made a decision to take those productions in-house, so they have been gearing up and backing up in a way that will allow for them to do that, she said.

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It wont change my role in the way that I work with them but there is a process now thats taking place, and also of course, the caution, the precautions that need to be taken with figuring out how to reimagine a docuseries and do it while adhering to safety protocols and finding a different way of making the show.

Young did stress that while she wasnt sure whether all spin-offs would be coming back taking production costs into account having seen how popular the shows have been for VH1 and its roster of shows to follow, the TV mogul and longtime manager of rapper Missy Elliott says she sees no reason why the entire franchise wouldnt return as a whole.

I kind of embrace the challenge and see it as a new frontier to be conquered, she continued. The beauty of it is each city has managed to establish its own fan base and has its own place in the zeitgeist and with the fans, and, of course my hope is that all four cities come back, there has been nothing to indicate otherwise."

They all have fared really well for the network in terms of ratings and theyve been the cornerstone of the programming there so I dont see that changing.

NEXT:Kim Kardashian, Gigi Hadid, & Other Celebs Battling Lifelong Illnesses

What Is 'Revenge' Star Emily Van Camp Doing Now?

Maurice Cassidy is an entertainment writer with a BA in Media and an MA in Film Production obtained at the New York Film Academy. He loves keeping up with all pop culture news and Hollywood gossip, and despite being born and raised in Germany, Maurice is always up to date with his favorite US celebrities and shows, including Love & Hip Hop and Jersey Shore Family Vacation. His favorite documentary is The Defiant Ones on Netflix.

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Has The Love And Hip Hop Franchise Been Canceled For Good? - TheThings

Given the recent racism-related discourse permeating the Star Wars fandom, it may come as a shock to many that Lucasfilm and Disney once stood against all stripes of racism.

Related: Newly Announced Star Wars: The High Republic Host Krystina Arielle Calls All White People Racist

As first reported by Itchy Bacca of Disney Star Wars Is Dumb, now-former Disney Animation Studios employee Justin Garrison placed a since-deleted ad for a non-white, non-male engineering manager to his personal Twitter in December of 2019.

Not that white males cant do a great job, Garrison said in a similarly-deleted follow-up tweet. We all do better work when we can feel safe and have more diverse opinions and backgrounds.

In late 2020, Garrison revealed how certain people on twitter didnt take kindly to that and said the company was racist for not hiring white dudes and that his impromptu classified ad had sparked a wave of complaints directed towards Disney, which eventually led the company to confront the engineer regarding his apparently professed beliefs.

[Disney] suspended me for 3 weeks, recalled Garrison. Had a 2+ month investigation, threatened me with legal action for various things, asked me about tweets from years ago, and my manager told me I should really question if Im racist or not because what I did was racist and illegal.

Garrison further explained that he was very active in trying to get diverse people in our pipelines and even successfully hired one.

He then noted, My reciter told me I brought in more leads than any other source. HR wanted screenshots and chat logs from everyone I ever talked to about our positions.

In the end, Garrison revealed, Disney HR didnt find anything wrong and gave me a non punishment, which he described as being prevented from doing things that were never actually a part of his regular job activities.

Shortly after the conclusion of the investigation, Garrison left Disney after receiving an offer somewhere else.

Garrison then described how the investigation had led him to question whether he was in the wrong,

He stated that he couldnt put words to what I was doing until I read anti-racist and realized it was exactly what I was trying to do.

Related: Bounding Into Comics Targeted For False Report Campaign In Retaliation For Report On Anti-White Racism of Star Wars: The High Republic Host Krystina Arielle

The book in question, How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi, discusses how certain policies, ideas, and actions should be dismantled in support of being anti-racist, while conversely claiming that supporters of these policies, ideas, and actions are themselves committing an act of racism.

In fact, Kendi argues that racism can be any form of inaction on policies and ideas as well, a mentality described as if someone is not actively supporting a cause, they are against it.

Further, Kendi believes that inaction and/or silence regarding a given injustice is just about as evil as supporting it.

Thus, it would appear that Kendis book led Garrison to believe that his attempt to diversify Disneys hiring process was a justified and righteous cause, not to mention one which would eventually lead to bigger and more well-paying opportunities elsewhere.

Related: Star Wars And Lucasfilm Officially Support Calling All White People Racist

It is important to note that Garrison is a former employee of Disney, with his Linkedin profile noting that he had served as one of Disneys Senior System Engineers for nearly 5 years between May 2014 and Nov 2018.

While Garrison faced consequences, if they could be called that, for his recruitment post, such an incident would have garnered a very different response in the current post-2016 environment.

In recent years, audiences have come to hear numerous creators actively profess their intent to run various companies according to social justice ideologies, such as New Gods director Ava Duverney, who justified potential anti-white discrimination by stating that bias can go both ways.

Others would also latch on to the anti-racist movement and try to buck the system by overcompensating, as exemplified by Seth Rogens declaration that he was just actively trying to make less things starring white people.

So thats how Ive been trying to deal with it, Rogen explained, is just to actively take as they would say, anti-racist measures to assure that some work is doing done to acknowledge that Black people are very marginalized in American society.

The list goes on. Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame star Tessa Thompson revealed that she didnt want to work with a bunch of white people on set. A number of professional productions have admitted to actively looking to pay less to white actors, while simultaneously requiring them to undergo forced anti-racism training.

But considering the lackadaisical method in which Disney moves on statements by Justina Ireland, the recent debacle with Krystina Arielle and her history of disparaging white people, and Star Wars official endorsement of such behavior, it seems Garrison might have a better environment to enact his Anti-racist hiring practices in the zeitgeist of 2021.

What do you make of Disneys approach to employment? Sound off in the comments below or lets talk about it on social media!

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Report: Disney Management Once Took Action Against Perceived Racist Hiring Practices - Bounding Into Comics

Sandra Goldmark is a triple-, or possibly quadruple-threat, but not in the conventional song and dance way. She is director of Campus Sustainability at Barnard College, and also a theater professor, set designer, and repair shop proprietor. Oh, and an author; Goldmarks book Fixation: How to Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet is a short but substantive and enjoyable dive into the relationship between humans and stuff, based on her own sustainability journey and passion for repair.

I first met Goldmark in 2014 at the Columbia Greenmarket, which I was managing at the time. She and her husband Michael, both seasoned theater professionals accustomed to fixing things at work, periodically brought their pop-up repair shop to the farmers market at 114th and Broadway, staying for three or four weeks at a time. They would spread the word that they were there for a week and then the next week theyd collect a stream of broken items from the community. A couple of weeks later, theyd bring them back fixed.

Goldmarks experience with the repair shop made a lasting impression on her. She discovered that its not just less wasteful to repair things; it also makes people feel good. Most of the people she interacted with at the shop werent getting items repaired because they wanted to be eco-friendly; they were doing it because of their attachment to the item. They didnt want to replace itthey wanted that particular thing to work again.

In Fixation, Goldmark outlines how stuff is a really essential part of who we are as humans; we couldnt survive without it, and it also gives us pleasure. She delves deep into our very troubled relationship to stuff and our insatiable appetite for it, and the consequences these have had for our planet. You can read an excerpt here.

I caught up with her to ask her some questions on our podcast, Pod of the Planet, and you can read a condensed version of our conversation below. Weve also put together a list of recommendations of shops and organizations that can help you on your journey to a more sustainable lifestyle at the end of the interview.

Sandra (sitting center) and her Fixit pop-up colleagues at a New York City Greenmarket.

You started as a set designer and professor for the Barnard College theater department. How did you come to your current position as director of Campus Sustainability?

As a set designer for many years, my job was to work with stuff to create meaning on stage with space and the objects in it. Another big part of the job of a set designer, unfortunately, is creating a lot of waste. Almost every design that you make goes, sooner or later, into the Dumpster.

My work in theater led me down this path of thinking about questions of consumption, of waste, and their roles in climate change, and eventually of circularity as a solution. Somewhere over the past 10 to 12 years, I got really fired up about that and I came up with circular economy solutions for our theater practices. I started the repair shops, which were a kind of like a real-world example of the same thing.

All of that ultimately fed back into this work of thinking about climate action on campus. Having worked across these disciplines for so many years, it made me feel very strongly that its good to have people working on these things from all different departments and perspectives. That has really fed into my work at Barnard. Were looking at climate action from as many angles as we can, with as many people in the room as we can.

Can you talk a little more about the repair shop? Do you have a favorite repair from your time in the repair shop, or one that is particularly memorable?

My husband and I and our colleagues started running these little short-term repair shops all over New York City, and we called ourselves Fixit. People would bring us all kinds of broken items. We accepted everything from lamps and appliances and furniture to toys and textiles and ceramics. As you mentioned, there were a lot of really specific objects. Twenty-five hundred of them, to be exact, that came through our shops.

It was an experiment into this question of whether people would pay for these services. How much would they pay? How could we tinker and disrupt the traditional business model of repair to make it sustainable and viable in New York, a very expensive city?

The Fixit workshop.

We ran these short-term shops for seven years. We did more than a dozen shops and dozens of educational events. It was funny because on the one hand, there did come to be a pattern, a repetitiousness of another lamp, another broken blender. But in another funny way, every little object was unique and told a story.

I really loved the paint touchups. Within set design, I really quite love scenic painting, so I love touching up things like ceramics or wood stains or jewelry. I remember one item, it was a yellow kids stool with a painting of a tiger on the top. We fixed the leg, but then the paint was all chipped, so I touched up the top.

Those jobs were really satisfying. First of all, its very soothing for me. Its a hard job that for me is easy, which is always fun. Theres something really satisfying about like the kind of invisibility of the mend when youre done. Some people in the repair world love visible mending, which can be very cool and very beautiful, but I think my theater illusionist heart really loves it when you hold up the bowl and the crack is completely camouflaged.

In your book you discuss a broad range of topics from sustainable agriculture, to set design, to furniture production, to waste cycles, to world religions. Can you talk a bit about the common threads running through the book? What ties it all together?

I guess the obvious common thread is stuff or consumption, whichever term you prefer. The reason I have so many threads is I really felt like after all these years in the repair shop, we needed to look at stuff as the incredibly complex and rich topic that it is. You can talk about it from a climate change perspective and talk about all the damage that were doing, and that is in the book. But I felt like in order to talk about solutions or a way out, you have to understand the problem from all the different perspectives. You have to really see and understand stuff, and what its doing in our lives. Because if you look around, its everywhere. Like right now, wherever you are, whoever you are, I guarantee you youre surrounded by objects made by humans.

Stuff, the things we make that are the products of our hands, is so central to who we are as a species, to who we are as individuals. And its also really central to the climate change problem because it is so monumental.

What Im trying to do in the book is acknowledge the vastness and the complexity of this topic on the personal level, on a business level, on a scientific climate change level, on a policy level. Appreciate the problemI shouldnt call it a problemappreciate this category of our humanity.

We cant really move ahead and try to get past our clogged planet if we dont understand that we need stuff and it is fundamentally a part of who we are as humans. That understanding of or respect for our stuff and the role it plays in our lives is something that I dont see talked about a lot.

I think thats why in my earlier answer, I was shying away from calling stuff a problem. Because while there are a lot of problems with stuff, I think that, just like food, if it becomes stigmatized then were missing part of the equation, which is that it can be a blessing and a source of joy. And its certainly essential to our survival.

Most Americans today are probably dealing with a problem of excess as opposed to a problem of scarcity, because thats where we are. Again, just like food, even at lower socioeconomic levels in this country, theres sometimes more of a problem of an excess of cheap stuff calories as opposed to actual scarcity of calories.

We love food, we love stuff, which is totally natural. But we have built a system that can satisfy every appetite to the nth degree in a heartbeat. The problem were facing today is due to our technological capacity to fulfill our appetites. The appetites themselves are totally normal and sensible and frankly, quite lovely.

How do we build a system that isnt over-satisfying our very natural appetites? Historically and still in certain traditional cultures, it was and is easier to live in balance. But those traditional habits surrounding stuff are being decimated as the U.S. exports its patterns of consumption worldwide, just like traditional languages, just like traditional diets. The traditional ways of living with the physical world are also being diminished by globalization.

When I worked at the Greenmarket, my friends and coworkers at the market and I used to talk about how working at the farmers market is a lifestyle. We were referring not only to the physical necessities of the job, but also to using reusable containers, composting, and reducing waste wherever possible.

Your book hits on a lot of similar aspects to that lifestyle in terms of waste reduction and making it work with what youve got. Can you talk about your personal lifestyle or guiding philosophy a little bit and how youve arrived where you are now?

Its a lifestyle, but theres another layer to it that has to do with habit, and physicalizing or internalizing certain behaviors. For instance, I dont think every time I throw something in the compost now. I just started composting at some point and now it feels weird to not do it. When New York canceled compost at the start of COVID, it was disgusting to me to put my food scraps right in the regular trash. It was so funny how disruptive that change was, and it was not because Im an environmentalist and trying to combat climate change, it was just because it was a break in my habit and it was this physical action that had started to feel really normal and healthy.

I think theres a huge part of the book that is about embracing that and saying theres a way to just begin. Like all habits, you do have to start somewhere, but then it can just become a thing that you do. Im trying to help people see that the steps to deal with stuff more sustainably are not complicated and like food, you can get there over time.

I learned a lot on the food movement in terms of the lifestyle question. The farmers market is a good analogy because the food movement is more advanced than what I call the stuff movement. Its more firmly established in the zeitgeist, or the collective consciousness, that what you eat and how you eat impacts the planet, impacts your health, impacts communities around the world.

I tried to consciously build on that and say, Hey, stuff is just like food, and just like you can have a healthy food way of living, you can have the healthy stuff way of living. Its not a fad diet. Its not a restrictive, horrible thing that youre going to have to change every few days.

Fixing some jewelry.

And so I (on purpose) borrowed from Michael Pollan, the food writer, because I love his work. I wanted to consciously build on his concepts and show people how its similar. Michael Pollan said for food, Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. So in Fixation I lay out these five steps for stuff: Have good stuff (not too much), mostly reclaimed. Care for it. Pass it on. Theres all kinds of details within it, but thats really all you have to remember.

How can we enlighten people so they see the importance of their individual choices within larger systems? In your book you say that not taking individual actions denies each of us a place in the world. If our actions are part of the problem, then they must be part of the solution. Whats your advice for people wanting to make a difference and be a part of the solution?

Im glad you brought this up, because its such an important question. I think in that section of the book that youre quoting, I was reacting what sometimes I see in the kind of climate action movement: this little fight between people saying individual actions dont matter versus individual actions do matter. Or the even more reductive version is to say its all the corporations fault.

Or sometimes Ill hear things like, Well, we dont need to change individual actions, what we need is systemic changeas if theres a dichotomy, or as if the two are not related. That whole thing just leaves me totally cold, because to me its all related. They are all separate levels of detail on the problem. I could zoom way out and talk about a systemic problem. I can zoom way in and talk about an individuals actions. If Im only looking at one, Im missing a part of the picture.

There are a lot of policies and business practices that would make it a lot easier for people to live these low-waste, sustainable lifestyles. Thats really what we need, because we need it to become the default. We need it to become easy. We cant wait around for people to heroically choose to repair their item instead of buying a new oneit does need to become part of the system.

Sandra and the team speaking with a customer at one of the Fixit pop-ups.

But taking individual action is part of getting there. Thats where you build at the community level. You go to the farmers market, you go to the community board, you go to the schools, and thats where you actually get a culture shift. Businesses also have a huge role to play, especially in this particular arena of stuff and consumption. They have to really change their core business models, which is a big ask, but I actually think its doable and believable.

A good example of how individual action and activism matter is the bag ban in New York City. We have this plastic bag policy in New York, which was passed in March. That policy, which is going to have so much impact, was built on a lot of individual actions and a lot of activism and community organizing. It will be supported and scaled and facilitated by businesses figuring out how to make it work from their perspectives. It shows all the spheres of individual, business, and policy.

This is why I get distressed when I hear people saying, Dont talk to individuals. Why not? Why would I only talk to one segment of society?

And of course, individuals make up all segments of society.

Exactly. Who do you think is writing the policies?

Wondering where to get started with healthier consumption habits? Goldmark has provided some recommendations for where to look for secondhand items, get things repaired, and find new homes for unwanted items. Some of these are specific to New York City, but there should be similar options elsewhere around the country. In no particular order:

Happy shopping, and wishing you a sustainable new year!

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Fixing Our Broken Relationship with 'Stuff': A Q&A With Sandra Goldmark - State of the Planet

Viola Davis, Colman Domingo on the Importance of Telling August Wilson's Stories on Screen (Exclusive)

With the arrival of Ma Raineys Black Bottom on Netflix, playwright August Wilsons celebration of Black lives once again takes center stage. The film, produced by Denzel Washington and starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman and Colman Domingo, chronicles the day in the life of the legendary blues singer and her backing band as they record music one afternoon in the 1920s. It also marks the second time one of Wilsons award-winning plays has been adapted for the screen. The first, of course, being Fences, which Washington produced, directed and starred in.The two-time Oscar winnerhas also made it his mission to make movie versions of Wilsons 10 plays, known as the Pittsburgh Cycle.

Also referred to as the Century Cycle, nine of the 10plays depict different generations of African Americans living in Pittsburghs Hill District, with the other, Ma Raineys Black Bottom, being set in Chicago and focused on the singer. Overall, Wilsons aim was to bring Black experiences -- not just a singular one -- in America to the stage, with all 10 eventually performed on Broadway.

He wrote vital plays, director Ruben Santiago-Hudson told ET of Wilsons work. Plays that had pulses. They reflected each generation and each time specifically in importance and nature of issues of that era. But things change only so much, the disguise just becomes different. August has a lot of revolution in his plays; its not just survival, theres a lot of revolution.

The last one to make it to Broadway was Wilsons first play, Jitney, which was directed by Santiago-Hudson and starred Andre Holland among an ensemble of Black actors. It opened at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York City in 2017, just as Fences was earning accolades, including four Academy Award nominations -- with one being a posthumous nod for Wilson in Best Adapted Screenplay -- and eventually one win, for Best Supporting Actress for Davis performance opposite Washington.

[Audiences] are being exposed to greatness, Davis told ET, when asked about the significance of Wilsons two works being produced for stage and screen at the same time. I think the worst thing is to be that great and to live in any sort of obscurity, because I know I've reaped the benefits of the words and that writing and those characters and those narratives and how much it enriched my life. That's the beauty of it. People are being exposed to the effects of that writing.

She added, Hes no longer unknown. Hes going to be right at the tip of everybody's tongue. It's not going to be August Wilson who?

It's significant because people recognize this extraordinary quality, and it allows the integrity of August Wilson's star to shine so bright right now, Santiago-Hudson also said of the zeitgeist moment, sharing Davis sentiment.

Several years later, Wilson is back in the spotlight as both Ma Raineys Black Bottom and Giving Voice, a documentary produced by Davis and Washington about an annual monologue competition inspired by his work, find their way onto Netflix. The projects also come amid a cultural reckoning in America, as the Black Lives Matter movement not only challenged the systemic and institutionalized racism in all facets of the country but encouraged the importance of Black stories in entertainment.

If director George C. Wolfe had it his way, Ma Raineys Black Bottom would have been released during the height of the movement over the summer. But Washington and others discouraged him from that knee-jerk reaction. Ultimately, the most important thing is that the film is out there, available for audiences to see again and again, unlike the play, which people often only get to see that one time.

People all over the world are going to see it, he tells ET now. I think that feels really kind of thrilling to me simply because all of a sudden, even people who know nothing about him or who have heard of him but havent seen the play will now have his language and his understanding of the world and his characters in their lives.

And what sets Ma Raineys Black Bottom apart from Wilsons other plays, and perhaps what makes it even more resonate as more stories about LGBTQ people of colorare being told, is that it focuses largely on a queer woman. I think thats something that needs to be even celebrated more so, Domingo says, adding that Wilsons plays tend to be very male-centric and normally dont include any gay characters.

But when it comes to Ma, the actor adds, shes a force to be reckoned with, who was an openly gay blues singer who was fighting so many fights in one day. Just to get through the day, she was a woman, she was a Black woman, she was a queer, Black woman in a male-dominated industry.

That diversity within the Black experience is even reflected in Giving Voice, and the new generation of performers who are interpreting and performing Wilsons words in the annual August Wilson Monologue Competition. Every year, thousands of students from across America vie for a chance to perform on Broadway.

And despite Wilsons work being written decades ago, for many of the young competitors, it still relatable to what many are going through today. If this play was written a while ago and this is still happening, we need to do something about it, says Gerardo Navarro, one of the teenage performers in the documentary.

No matter what, with both projects available on the streaming platform, People will now know the majesty of August Wilsons work, Wolfe says.

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Viola Davis, Colman Domingo on the Importance of Telling August Wilson's Stories on Screen (Exclusive) - WUSA9.com

Bonus Slide: Hamilton

Dont let anyone tell you differently: The streaming event of the year was Hamilton on Disney+.

Sadly, its also the hardest to categorize. Was it a Broadway documentary? A TV special? A stand-alone film? Its a little bit of all three, so it belongs on its own bonus slide.

Below are some other honorable mentions:

Honorable Mentions:

10. The Invisible Man

Director: Leigh Whannell

One of my biggest gripes is seeing year-end best lists that include only Oscar bait from late December that most folks havent seen yet. Instead, lets kick off my Top 10 by reaching all the way back to February for a horror remake that actually rivaled the original.

Written and directed by Saw creator Leigh Whannell, The Invisible Man featured a powerful performance byElisabeth Moss, who believes her abusive boyfriend is stalking her as an invisible man. Is she just going crazy? Or is something supernatural actually at play? Boasting #MeToo themes and juicy plot twists, it was one of the few actual blockbusters that we had this year.

9. Palm Springs

Director: Max Barbakow

Imagine a screenwriter entering a room to pitch Groundhog Day meets Wedding Crashers. Thats the basic premise of Palm Springs, which wowed the Sundance Film Festival before streaming on Hulu.

Set in Palm Springs, California, this rom-com fantasy follows a carefree wedding guest (Andy Samberg) and a reluctant maid of honor (Cristin Milioti), who meet at her sisters wedding. Thanks to a magical force in the desert, they cant escape the venue and are forced to relive the chaotic wedding day over and over again.

Equally heartwarming and hilarious, its an inventive take on a gimmick that you thought was played out.

8. Bad Education

Director: Cory Finley

Produced by HBO Films, Bad Education should be competing for the Oscars this year instead submitting for the Emmys in the TV Movie category. Quarantine has shown us that such labels are outdated, as Bad Education isnt episodic content but rather a stand-alone film that should compete against other streamers.

Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney are in top form as Long Island Superintendent Frank Tassone and Assistant Superintendent Pamela Gluckin, who carried out the largest public school embezzlement scandal in American history from 1992 to 2004. In a year where Hollywood stars went to prison for the college admissions scandal, Bad Education is as much a zeitgeist flick as any movie made this year.

7. Mank

Director: David Fincher

Is there a film whose merits have been argued about more this award season than Mank? David Finchers nostalgic biopic to Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) is not for casual moviegoers, but rather a black-and-white love note to cinephiles who appreciate the significance of Orson Welles masterpiece not only to cinema history, but for its commentary on egomaniacal media moguls.

Mank is not really a making of film at all; its a collection of puzzle pieces in the life of a man on the ground floor of a booming industry who sabotaged his own career with booze and shame for his creative vocation.

6. Da 5 Bloods

Director: Spike Lee

Tied for the No. 6 slot are a pair of movies featuring the final roles of the late Chadwick Boseman.

First isSpike Lees war joint Da 5 Bloods, the much anticipated follow-up to his long overdue Academy Award win for BlacKkKlansman (2018). The June release starred Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis as Vietnam vets searching for the remains of their fallen officer, played in flashbacks by Boseman.

Little did we know that he would pass away just months later, making his role eerily prescient as he returns from the dead in rays of angelic light to say, I forgive you. God is love. Love is God. I died for you, blood.

6. Ma Raineys Black Bottom

Director: George C. Wolfe

Also tied for our No. 6 slot is Chadwick Bosemans posthumous Netflix release, Ma Raineys Black Bottom.

Based on the second of 10 plays in August Wilsons renowned Century Cycle, the story is set on a hot day in 1920s Chicago, where the so-called Mother of the Blues Ma Rainey records her newest album.

Viola Davis is a tour de force as the impossible diva demanding Coca Cola, while showing empathy toward her stuttering nephew. Still, its Boseman who steals the show as brash trumpeter Levee, who carries a chip on his emaciated shoulders. Its hard to watch this beloved man dying before our very eyes, lending a transcendent power to monologues challenging God as if Boseman himself is shouting, Why me? on deaths door.

Just as Troys baseball dreams were stolen in Fences (2018), Levees hopes are dashed here, but Bosemans greatness is forever frozen in time on screen in a final performance that deserves to win a posthumous Oscar.

5. The Trial of the Chicago 7

Director: Aaron Sorkin

In perhaps Netflixs best shot at winning Best Picture, writer/director Aaron Sorkin combines his mastery of politics (The West Wing) and courtroom drama (A Few Good Men) to chornicle thetrue story of seven men arrested during an uprising outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The deep cast boasts Frank Langella as the judge, Mark Rylance as the defense attorney and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the lead prosecutor, but the real standouts areEddie Redmayne as academic Tom Hayden andSacha Baron Cohen as activistAbbie Hoffman, who dropped f-bombs in a flag shirt in Forrest Gump (1994).

Their clash of ideals explodes as Redmayne confronts Cohen: My problem is that, for the next 50 years, when people think of progressive politics, theyre gonna think of you and your idiot followers passing out daisies to soldiers and trying to levitate the Pentagon. Theyre not gonna think of equality or justice, theyre not gonna think of education or poverty or progress, theyre gonna think of a bunch of stoned, lost, disrespectful, foul-mouthed, lawless losers, so well lose elections.

Cohen gets the last laugh as he takes the stand. Do you have contempt for your government? Gordon-Levitt asks, to which Cohen replies, I think the institutions of our democracy are wonderful things that are right now populated by some terrible people.

4. Sound of Metal

Director: Darius Marder

Sound of Metal was my favorite streaming film at this years hybrid Middleburg Film Festival. The film follows a heavy metal drummer and his lead singer girlfriend, who drive from town to town in their mobile home to perform. However, when he begins losing his hearing, they must decide their future as a band and as a couple.

Riz Ahmed brilliantly expresses emotion with his face, Olivia Cooke is believably torn as his girlfriend and Paul Raci is an Oscar dark horse for Best Supporting Actor as the wise operator of a remote home for deaf folks, teaching sign language through tough love and total immersion.

The filmmaker similarly immerses the audience with his masterful use of sound design from ringing ears to distorted voices. The final shot is perfection, reminding us to block out the noise and enjoy the silence, knowing that true peace is the ability to sit with ones self.

3. One Night in Miami

Director: Regina King

It doesnt arrive until Christmas Day, but One Night in Miami has all the makings of a strong Best Picture contender. While it takes place almost entirely inside a Miami hotel room, Kemp Powers screenplay is surprisingly engaging as it imagines the conversation between Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) in their real-life meeting in 1964.

As the four very different men discuss the civil rights movement, their personalities shine and clash as they rib each other, question themselves and break down the state of race relations from various perspectives.

Regina King is on fire after her Oscar for If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) and her Emmy for Watchmen (2019), so it should be no surprise that her directorial debut is dynamite, turning an intimate chamber piece into an electric proving ground for symbolism, foreshadowing our heroes doom by filming them behind wooden bars. In the end, Malcolm X closes his eyes as Cooke sings A Change is Gonna Come on national television for his first public political statement. The song swells with the same smooth voice that Odom brought to Hamilton, proving once again in this Miami hotel, its thrilling to be in the room where it happened.

2. Nomadland

Director: Chlo Zhao

In 2017, Chlo Zhao showed indie promise with her poetic rodeo film The Rider. Now, she returns to her favorite canvas of the modern American West in Nomadland, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Peoples Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival the only film ever to win both.

The film follows Fern, a drifting widow who becomes a van-dwelling nomad after losing her husband, her factory job and her identity during the 2008 Great Recession. Surrounded by real-life nomads, Frances McDormand is utterly vulnerable in a role reminiscent of Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas (1984). She will surely compete for her third Oscar after Fargo (1996) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017).

As for Zhao, shes an early favorite to win Best Director for capturing the plight of Americans displaced by technology and globalization, as Fern works an assembly line at Amazon and stocks shelves at Walmart. It all builds to a trio of silent scenes at an empty Thanksgiving table, an abandoned factory office and a foreclosed home, giving smart viewers credit to decipher Ferns thoughts: its time to let go of her grief and carry on.

1. First Cow

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Its no coincidence that mytop three movies are helmed by female filmmakers whose unique insights offer wise lessons on the human condition. Kelly Reichardts First Cow competed for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in February and was one of the last films released theatrically in March before the pandemic shut down multiplexes. The rest of us finally got to stream it on-demand in July, quietly discovering a poetic work of art.

Reichardts pacing is blissfully patient as her camera holds for painterly compositions where the natural world exists before and after the humans enter and exit the frame. She opens in present day as a hiker discovers the skeletons of two men side by side in the wilderness, then proceeds to show us how they got there. Set in 1820s Oregon, its a tranquil tale of frontier friendship between a fur-trapping chef (John Magaro) and a Chinese immigrant (Orion Lee), who plot to steal milk from the regions first cow to make delicious baked goods to sell.

Will the cows wealthy owner discover their scheme once he tastes the food? Their fate is tragically sealed from the very beginning, but the mens bond endures into eternity. Maybe Im just a sucker for a good Western, or maybe I just love a simple story beautifully told, but I surprised myself to find that this was my favorite of 2020.

WTOP's Jason Fraley salutes the year's best movies (Part 2)

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Best movies of 2020 - WTOP