I am regularly supporting and referencing the work of the late lamented Mark Fisher in this blog. I like this zer0 books statement taken from Mark's collected posthumous writings K-Punk, and it may well have been written by Mark, it has his slightly overwrought hammering adjectivalism. But what it speaks to is the story of the ripped out heart of the community, intellectually, socially, architecturally, visually, culturally. It speaks to the flattened and corrupted times.
'Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces-both physical and cultural- are now either derelict or colonised by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheered by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor. The informal censorship internalised and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propoganda chiefs of Stalinism could only have dreamt of imposing. Zer0 books knows that another kind of discourse-intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist-is not only possible: Its is already flourishing in the regions beyong the striplit malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zer0 is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.'
Adventure Culture Spirit Comment
24.11.19
Careful with the China! The small time social corruption of the Corporate Hotel Space!
The corruption of Public Space is an inevitable impact of the Corporate Culture-car parks and CCTV and vile brutalist many-roomed battery hen hotels. Here's my recent experience:
I recently had a very unpleasant two days staying in the very awful Northampton Marriot Hotel-a dull hideous building set just outside what is a very interesting city implicated in every aspect of Britain's industrial revolution. As well as notoriously being the birthplace of Comics genius, and Chaos Magician, and general bad boy, Alan Moore,
At £130 a night and additional breakfast costs of £13.60 yes that is £13.60! I expected to be carried in from my taxi on a dais by a quartet of Mr Universe winners and massaged by winnowed maidens until my bones melted and I collapsed into a huge four poster to the sound of an actual live quintet who would discreetly withdraw as I began to snore in contented and much deserved slumber on feathered down cushions produced by highly spoilt free ranging geese from Hungary.
Oh and I had to pay a further £350 for a training in a emotionally malnourished methodology for working with people with a learning disability called PAMS. But I will write about this scam in more detail in a few weeks.
But alas no. The Corporate World cuts service to the bone because service costs. And the imagination of the corporate world as illustrated by my Marriot Hotel stay is constrained at every level by penny pinching, mean spirited, high priced servility that I found actually quite disgusting. What a horrible place to have to be away from home-without warmth, humour, beauty, or creativity. You have a problem? Well the organisation won't sort it for you. Don't want to pay £13.60 for a rasher of bacon and a sausage. Oh well you have paid in advance and 'we cannot refund your payment because it has to go to our central office...etc...etc...'
Oh my God I had to stay at the Sheffield Holiday Inn! More Kafka than Burroughs! Great city though. The Museum Pub-brilliant fish and chips and the friendliest welcoming staff. Returning to the Holiday Inn was like going back to an underfunded psychiatric unit!
Oh my God I had to stay at the Coventry Ibis! Like a secret meeting place for paedophiles or GRU assassins or dark web dissemblers, or purveyors of dodgy psychedelic shipments from Malawi, or a venue for organ transplant smugglers, or just people who were struggling financially but were also actually evil.
Oh my eyes and whiskers! I stayed at The Jury's Inn in Glasgow-my birthplace you donut! It was ok-ish but then I was with my brother!
How do you find the best B&B's for struggling writers, philosophers and social workers, revolutionary poets and barabarous artists?
I recently had a very unpleasant two days staying in the very awful Northampton Marriot Hotel-a dull hideous building set just outside what is a very interesting city implicated in every aspect of Britain's industrial revolution. As well as notoriously being the birthplace of Comics genius, and Chaos Magician, and general bad boy, Alan Moore,
At £130 a night and additional breakfast costs of £13.60 yes that is £13.60! I expected to be carried in from my taxi on a dais by a quartet of Mr Universe winners and massaged by winnowed maidens until my bones melted and I collapsed into a huge four poster to the sound of an actual live quintet who would discreetly withdraw as I began to snore in contented and much deserved slumber on feathered down cushions produced by highly spoilt free ranging geese from Hungary.
Oh and I had to pay a further £350 for a training in a emotionally malnourished methodology for working with people with a learning disability called PAMS. But I will write about this scam in more detail in a few weeks.
But alas no. The Corporate World cuts service to the bone because service costs. And the imagination of the corporate world as illustrated by my Marriot Hotel stay is constrained at every level by penny pinching, mean spirited, high priced servility that I found actually quite disgusting. What a horrible place to have to be away from home-without warmth, humour, beauty, or creativity. You have a problem? Well the organisation won't sort it for you. Don't want to pay £13.60 for a rasher of bacon and a sausage. Oh well you have paid in advance and 'we cannot refund your payment because it has to go to our central office...etc...etc...'
Oh my God I had to stay at the Sheffield Holiday Inn! More Kafka than Burroughs! Great city though. The Museum Pub-brilliant fish and chips and the friendliest welcoming staff. Returning to the Holiday Inn was like going back to an underfunded psychiatric unit!
Oh my God I had to stay at the Coventry Ibis! Like a secret meeting place for paedophiles or GRU assassins or dark web dissemblers, or purveyors of dodgy psychedelic shipments from Malawi, or a venue for organ transplant smugglers, or just people who were struggling financially but were also actually evil.
Oh my eyes and whiskers! I stayed at The Jury's Inn in Glasgow-my birthplace you donut! It was ok-ish but then I was with my brother!
How do you find the best B&B's for struggling writers, philosophers and social workers, revolutionary poets and barabarous artists?
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