Word: postmodernity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Deconstruction everywhere. Retro is getting tired. Until they start making ice cream flavors in Postmodern Pistachio Pastiche, this headlong rush to reassemble everything from its self-conscious rubble can still be stomached. Put postmodernism in your mouth and you'll find it's indigestible. Thankfully, and refreshingly, kitsch-pop masters Pizzicato Five can still render postmodernism an enjoyably tasteful joy ride. They trip through safe and smiley TV-land in a jalopy heap slapped together from '60s and jap pop, hip hop beats, funk threads, classical samples, bossa nova riffs and exotica, running on smooth easy-listening gas. Maki Nomiya...
...President," "He promised me he would [fill in the blank]"--add bathos, and you have a typical paragraph. Repeat three times, and you have a page. Spritz with psychobabble and enough self-improvement rhetoric to fuel a Weight Watchers convention, and you have a "Book Event," a postmodern creation that has feelings but no thoughts. While examining her every emotion, Monica reports nothing about the White House other than the President's private study and bathroom. For all we know, she could have passed Tony Blair on her way out of the Oval Office but not told us because what...
About an hour into the festival, we moved into a second viewing room, also showing shorts. The BUFF programmer, Bernard Broginart, welcomed everyone to "this wonderful hoax of a film festival" with a smile. While I didn't really grasp the intricacies of Bite My Bohonkus, a postmodern nightmare involving a chicken-woman, a mini tank-vehicle from the future and a diva with a four foot behind, I did thoroughly enjoy A Waiter Tomorrow. Two servers in a mediocre sushi restaurant deal with the mounting stress of their disrespectful guests by diving from the kitchen with a pistol...
Shirley Manson and Garbage disappointed in much the same way. The band pushed and grooved with charisma but never lived up to the depth of its recorded material. Garbage is fundamentally a postmodern pastiche of loops, synthesizers and layers of vocal tracks that could not be reproduced in a live setting--there was never any expectation of replicating the studio magic on stage. But the group provided no substitute for the irreproducible, no extra beeps or stage props or surprise supplementary music. Manson left the viewer with the impressive Technicolor image of a fluid, prancing carrot-top frontwoman; Garbage left...
...like the postmodern icon she is, Madonnatells us in "Nothing really matters" that herwhole career has been a matter of performing oncue...