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23 May

Bully Superstar | Jeremy Lybarger

Fassbinder 1000's of Mirrors by Ian Penman. 200 pages, Semiotext(e). 2023. There are only two ways to start an essay on Rainer Werner Fassbinder: with sex or with death. All the things else is scenery. This one begins with death. On the 1982 Venice Film Festival, a pirated copy of Fassbinder’s death mask reportedly made the rounds of hotels and cafes, smuggled in a plastic bag like a kilo, like takeout. Juliane Lorenz, a movie editor moonlighting as Fassbinder’s wannabe widow, commissioned the mask after the director died at thirty-seven—prematurely, but still right on cue—that June. (Stroke...
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9 Oct

FN Meka Was Supposed To Be Hip Hop’s First

When Capitol Records announced that they'd signed their first-ever AI Hip Hop artist in mid-August, it appeared like the natural next step within the industry’s integration into the Metaverse. Completely generated each visually and sonically by programming algorithms, FN Meka was seemingly primed for superstardom in each the physical world and the web’s third generation. Nevertheless it quickly got here crumbling down when fans got an eyeful of their newest artificial Hip-Hop freshman – green locs, face tattoos, vaguely multi-ethnic features – and even worse once they got an earful of his slur-laden lyrics, proudly describing a life-style of crime and struggle he had never lived, particularly since he was technically imaginary. “I believe the overarching misstep here is that...
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