Buckaroo Banzai
For one moment, it seemed as though the Eighties might turn out OK.
Josh Glenn is a Kingston (NY)-based consulting semiotician. He is cofounder of the consultancy Semiovox, editor of the websites SEMIOVOX and HILOBROW, and founding editor of The MIT Press's proto-sf RADIUM AGE series. He is an adjunct instructor at RISD and convenor of the monthly online Semiofest Sessions. His books include The Idler's Glossary, Significant Objects, and the family activities guide Unbored. In the ’90s, Josh published the intellectual zine/journal Hermenaut; in the 2000s, he was a founding staffer and columnist for the Boston Globe's IDEAS section.
For one moment, it seemed as though the Eighties might turn out OK.
"I am still trying to approach my work with the same intentions I had as a child."
Parody is an art form for "children who have had imposed upon them a meaningless iconography."
"Between the experiential cunning of the animal and the more self-disciplined and attentive cunning of the man."
"Disney sold him into slavery, and he’s nothing. He's nothing."
A non-compact topological group of bare-breasted women in G-strings.
How do we identify codes, and in doing so begin to construct a meaning matrix?
"He’s so much of an institution that we’re limited in what we can do with him."
How to survive not war, but peace, with one’s humanity intact?
How do we identify paradigms and thematic complexes?
"A degenerate 'middlebrow' horror, mass-produced for profit."
Comical yet not funny, equal-opportunity in its portrayal of human folly, artificial in the extreme.