Word: noir
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...reasons noir has been repopularized may be specific to our era, but ironically they give me hope for the future of noir. Whatever the short-term future of the genre, I think there will be another resurgence of interest during the next technological revolution (and the economic boom that accompanies it). We may not be able to imagine what that revolution will be, but I can tell you what people will be reading when it happens...
...information superhighway does its best to run in a straight line. A search for the word "hockey," will yield "puck.com"; searching for "weather" produces copious charts and myriad maps. Predictable. But throw a loaded word like "noir" into the query box, and suddenly this so-called super-highway has more twists and curves than the line for Space Mountain. "Noir" is certainly one of the most frequently used and misused terms in scholastic, artistic, and intellectual circles, and the Web proves no exception; a search turned up 1,664 sites that use the word in one capacity or another...
Before descending into the depths of internet weirdness, it's important to make a couple of distinctions. First off, about half of the responses to the "noir" web search were wine-related sites, dedicated to connoisseurs of the pinot noir vintage. Of the remaining 800 sites, maybe one fourth were French web sites simply using the word in its native context--for example "le rinoceros noir," an informative page dedicated to the black rhino. That leaves approximately 600 sites related to the conventional idea of noir, and of those sites, the majority were fairly ordinary, academically or intellectually-oriented pages...
After these relatively tame outposts of noir film and literature, things start to get a little bit shady. The music industry seems to have appropriated the noir concept quite vigorously. Carly Simon's album "Film Noir," a tribute to music from the 1940's, boasts an elaborate official homepage, complete with commentary from Billboard magazine. The less-mainstream Oregon group Duoglide offers up a "listening guide" for their "Song Noir" album, which they claim sounds like "cheap hotels, smoke, neon, martinis, and danger"; how they can produce this effect with two people and a banjo is a question...
...course, no internet search fails to turn up some smut. The "noir" web search lead directly to the "Leather Fetish Consensual SM Magazine"-- boudoirnoir.com--featuring the Boudoir-Noir Online Cafe, where leather fetishists can talk shop to their consensual hearts' delight. This site, which has recorded over 388,000 hits to date, also features a bulletin board advertising important upcoming events; the Leather Leadership Conference next month in New York may be the next big step in the national leather community's fight for freedom...