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by: Steve Beard
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 824.914
EAN: 9781852425968
ISBN: 1852425962
Label: Serpent's Tail
Manufacturer: Serpent's Tail
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: June 15, 1999
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Sales Rank: 3106736
Studio: Serpent's Tail
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
This work tunnels into the collective unconscious of the 1990s, offering a core sample of transglobal style culture. This collection of pieces from Steve Beard is a mix of celebrity interviews, personality profiles, event reviews, Q&As, industry exposes, and conceptual lines of escape. Covering print, film, electronica, porn, cyberfeminism, high theory, meta-media, art, rock & roll and drugs, this book also features Damien Hirst, William Gibson, J.G. Ballard, Dennis Hopper, Disney, Marsall McLuhan, William Burroughs, Paul Virilio, Philip K. Dick and Elvis.
Amazon.com Review:
Journalist Steve Beard says he likes to think of himself as a 'smuggler of intellectual contraband.' This collection of articles, interviews, letters, random thoughts, and 'conceptual lines of escape' sees him opening up his false-bottomed suitcase and showing the world just what he's gotten away with over the last 10 years. Beard has always attempted to 'bring ideas from the margins in to the mainstream,' says Matthew Collin in the preface to this book, and in a decade of writing for what used to be known as the 'style press,' Beard has consistently larded his pieces on music, art, fashion, films, literature, whatever with a dizzying appreciation of modernisms from postmodernism to technological humanism, from gothic Marxism to modern primitivism. Whether discussing Burroughs or Ballard, Damien Hirst or Dennis Hopper, Beard exhibits a vast range of references and reading. He's just as comfortable talking about Euro-Disney--'a god damned semiotic paradise'--as he is about the University of Warwick Virtual Futures Conference. You may think that such a wide-ranging book would be difficult to navigate. Don't worry, it's structured like a scrapbook--an idea 'partly suggested by the ethnographic surrealist Marcel Mauss'--and has a most helpful index of concepts as well as of names. --Nick Wroe
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - intermittently interesting
This collection of "transmissions from the edge of style culture" is intermittently interesting, depending on one's personal interests, level of interest in cultural studies and tolerance for semi-academic jargon. Beard's pieces are mostly republished from various style mags (mostly i-D and Arena) he wrote for over the course of the '90s. For me, he's probably at his best extolling various sci-fi writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, or J. G. Ballard or specific topics as opposed to the ... Read More
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