Ok, so let’s first off state that any book which refers to America and AmericaTM is going to have to commit some previous grievous acts of stupidity in order to get on my bad-side. As a matter of fact I read this when it first came out and just read it again, so there’s a great deal of good to be found.
In Culture Jam, Kalle Lasn takes on corporate america, most specifically the way that adverting is destroying our mental environment. (for those of you who know that Lasn founded Adbusters, that won’t come as much of a surprise)
Title: Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America
Author: Kalle Lasn
LC Rating:
Lasn takes an eloquent, impassioned look at the american cultural environment and makes a compelling case for it being every bit as poisoned and brutalized as our physical environment.
What makes this worth reading is the fact that he doesn’t stop there, there is a nice overview of the situationist movement, (which thanks to synchronicity, I’ve been taking a good look at thru the media of film) and offers up a very hopeful picture of how agitated individuals can participate directly in progress towards social sanity.
I’m going to be blatantly honest and say that I enjoyed it much more the first time I read it. However, I also understand that I first read this back when I was still professionally involved in the environmental movement, and moving thru the world in the dizzying rush of idealism at it’s most fiery. I’m willing to admit that it could be a measure of encroaching pessimism on my part, but also the fact that some of the ideas and confidently stated dreams in Culture Jam came over me in waves of melancholy, because they just haven’t come to be.
In the final analysis, those waves of melancholy can help, if you take them and twist them into motivation. And I have to say this about Lasn, he’s got his rose-colored glasses stapled to his face, but in age of increasing cynicism… Culture Jam is still a breath of fresh-air, and almost certainly more applicable now then when it was first published.
January 25th, 2006 at 5:01 am
Nice Blog.
What annoys me sometimes about people who call themselves culture jammers is their adherance to hierarchies - be it the heirarchies of rebellion. (I know what I’m talking about - I met Craig Baldwin, Earth’s answer to Zaphod Beeblebrox).
I always beg them to take in a few lines of Debord & Sanguinettis Text “The S.I. and it’s times”, sometimes called “The veritable split”.
It’s short, it’s concise, it changes the way you think about radical movements.
Unless you are Zaphod Beeblebrox, in which case it confirms everything you always liked about yourself.
Cheers,
Simon