Looking at press coverage of The Innocence of the Muslims (2012) I’m not particularly surprised I’ve yet to find any that compares the reception of this film to the reaction that greeted Jens Jørgen Thorsen’s attempts to make the movie The Sex Life Of Jesus in the 1970s. Before even starting to shoot his flick Thorsen’s found himself vilified in the media and banned from the UK and many other countries. Thorsen had planned to make the film in Britain but was forced to (temporarily) abandon the project under intense opposition from Christian morality campaigners like Mary Whitehouse, Queen Elizabeth II (the fundamentalist head of the Church of England, as well as head of the British state), then British Prime Minister James Callaghan, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan (Elizabeth II’s top Church of England hatchet man of the time).

The ongoing transformation of human social organisation is reflected in the transformation of cultural forms. This is, of course, why the lettrists announced back in the early 1950s that: “the cinema too must be destroyed!” Right now movies look pretty superannuated in comparison to gaming and social media. Even Hollywood bores like Brad Pitt are admitting there is no way they are going to get the kind of upfront salaries they did in the past. However, Pitt is wrong when he claims the economic crisis alone is responsible for doing-in Hollywood. Downloading and file sharing are games changers as much for film as for music.

Self-obsession, self-referentiality, solipsism, egotism and narcissism: «a href=“https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/09/seven-wonders-of-the-world-wide-web/" target="_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”>https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2012/09/09/seven-wonders-of-the-world-wide-web/> The sheer amount of resources poured into search engine optimisation (SEO) which is a zero sum game: <https://blog.stewarthomesociety.org/2012/09/09/seven-wonders-of-the-world-wide-web/> The reduction in the number of items in list blogs as attention spans shorten. Lists blogs are increasingly made up of less than ten items: <https://blog.stewarthomesociety.org/2012/09/09/seven-wonders-of-the-world-wide-web/> Repetition of basically the same information again and again: <https://blog.stewarthomesociety.org/2012/09/09/seven-wonders-of-the-world-wide-web/> Link wheels creating a pattern of links that flow from one website to another and which finally link to a targeted website requiring promotion (SEO): <https://blog.stewarthomesociety.org/2012/09/09/seven-wonders-of-the-world-wide-web/> Cynicism and nihilism: <https://blog.stewarthomesociety.org/2012/09/09/seven-wonders-of-the-world-wide-web/> Seven & seven is – in this instance seven and seven is actually less than one since we’ve reached the implosion point of capitalist ideology: <https://blog.

For me there is little if any point in defending the historical standing of the Lettrist International. Histories are always contested and a passive contemplation of the past is pointless. As the Lettrist International knew it is a matter of bringing the past back into play or else forgetting it. In the 1950s the Lettrists adopted the term psychogeography because they liked its pleasing vagueness but today in the anglophone world this word is totally recuperated. Psychogeography in England is now a matter of middle-class literary hacks walking around urban and suburban spaces and then acting as if they have simultaneously swallowed a thesaurus and a very bland work of local history and are ever so politely regurgitating both at once.

When I was a toddler I used to like spinning around and around for long periods of time. Sometimes I’d fall down, while on other occasions I’d stop still standing up and marvel at the room still spinning around me despite my movements having ceased. When I first tried acid as a teenager it took me right back to these early childhood experiences of spinning. And although those first LSD experiences are a few decades behind me I can still dig whirling around and around. I was spinning around this morning for the first time in several months and it really grooved me as a trippy experience.