I was thinking about "Goblincore" a lot for awhile (not so much now). It's newish (since around 2019), a catch-all term for an aesthetic based on ugliness, nature, & paranormal wildness. Wabisabi, but more in-your-face. Sometimes i do this with "micro-aesthetics": try to find philosophical principles in them, & extend them to things i like. Like Vaporwave, which was first a kind of electronic music (about 10 or 15 years ago), but quickly became a set of visual clichés (mid-90s tech, Classical statuary, pink, violet & turquoise colors, maybe mildly de Chirico-ish surrealism) that become referenceable in other media. Thus it becomes possible to ask: what movies can be seen as an anticipation or precursor to Vaporwave? (One from the Heart, by Francis Ford Coppola; Fässbinder's Querelle). What places have i been to, or could go to, to find V. images? I thought of a futuristic self-service frozen-yogurt place we used to go to, garishly decorated in orange, chrome, & white, with uncomfortable blobby furniture, but which instantly cast you into an altered state of mind, just because it was so unlike what lay beyond its doors. Or the famous old Starck Club (80s), which had a front door like a bank vault, & gauzy white curtains that kept you from being able to see very far in any direction (outside the sunken dance floor); all black & hard-surfaces otherwise.
Well, when i think Goblincore, there's ruin-tourism (which is only an extension of regular tourism)--in parts of Detroit, there are probably more photographers than permanent residents--& then there's Chernobyl-tourism: which is truly monstrous. Incongruous mixtures (well, until they're accepted, as the Paranormal Romance is now), lumpy & messy & not at all principled--which is where it ties into High Modernism, which was, more than just re-intellectualizing established artforms like painting or poetry, but what we now can call "rewilding" (the African scultptures that inspired Picasso; the snippets of actual speech or journal entries in Eliot & Pound), bringing back weird energy from its having been cast out when they tried to tidy up Romanticism. That puppet-movie The Dark Crystal... I can see Goblincore in the earliest AI-art, that soon became too close to human art to bother anyone anymore; & in this recent attempt (now starting to associate itself with the name "Rum Ram Ruf"--Chaucer's pejorative in the Parson's Tale) to write again in meters inspired by Beowulf or Gawain and the Green Knight. --It's all expressive, to me, of the transitional time between fossil fuels & nationstates, & whatever comes after...
"to desire or be desired"
in aerial bombardment we trust · bully
with a bully's fears · fastness of ignorance
& when nontroops travel · portray ourselves Canadian
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