Rogueish
02/01/12
The other interesting thing about Vorticist Britney Spears was the experience of spending an afternoon making the macros. When the connection between Britney and vorticism occurred to me, I looked through BLAST for quotes and through Britney fan sites for pictures and then started trying to fit the text on the pictures. This meant trying to find an aesthetically pleasing arrangement of text in an image the composition of which was usually determined by the curves of Britney’s body; that is, it involved an odd sort of typographic eroticism. And a rather dubious sort of eroticism it is, too, as it involves me actively arranging meanings around a passive and mute young woman. This dubiousness is appropriate in a way, though, as the Britney/Vorticism connection lies in the relation between modernism, industrialism, and populism, which is not necessarily a combination that has been especially pleasant for the women caught up in it.
01/29/12
Perhaps the most useful thing that came out of setting up the Vorticist Britney Spears tumblr is that I discovered that full scans of both issues of BLAST are online (Issue 1, Issue 2).
L o n g L i v e t h e V o r t e x !
10/29/11
AUTOMOBILISM (marinetteism) bores us. we don’t want to go about making a hullo-bullo about motor cars. any more than about knives and forks, elephants or gas-pipes.
Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.
Wilde gushed twenty years about the beauty of machinery. Gissing, in his romantic delight with modern lodging houses was futurist in this sense.
The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870.
