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  • bigbalagan

bigbalagan

1 year ago

in It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here: Channelling <i>The Firesign Theatre</i> on newcritics
Almost everyday I'm tempted to shout "don't use your hands, son, eat with your entrenching tool!" at my fourteen-year-old. (Imagine if he came back with "Don't worry Dad, no one can beat you for Dog Killer").

The missing piece isn't the dope, its the media. What FST did was take every standard media trope and cliche, build a bizarrely coherent stream of interweaving stories with them, and present the commonest of media experiences turned inside out. Not only was the team hyper=conscious about the norms and how to violate them, but even seemed to be conscious of their physical existence on vinyl ("going to the other side...").

So rather than needing pot, it *is* a kind of pot---a subversion of mass reality. The reaction has been so successful that this is now just another option, another aesthetic tactic, and no long can carry the same subversive charge. Your son is ok, he's just living in a different era...
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