Episode 38: Weesa In Big Doo Doo Summer (Politics & Poetry) [PATREON PREVIEW]
Alec and Nick discuss the politics and poetry of Jar Jar Binks as a fraught, irredeemable, and complicated figuration of online media culture. Christening summer 2022 as a “Weesa In Big Doo Doo Summer,” the duo discuss a “Binksian paradigm” as an imagistic cultural impasse and toxicity meter that encodes a variety of recent contemporary cultural tropes: the re-emergence of everything from caricature and Catholicism to ambiguous political discourse, Nu Metal, rabid fan culture, and aughts humor. The conversation opens up into an examination of the tensions between archetype and stereotype, models of insufficiency and fiction found in the thought of Francois Laruelle, structural racism in America, as well as the development of auto-fiction, AI Image generators, new field recording practices and more as signaling toward a simultaneous ambivalence and obsession toward representation and symbolism in contemporary culture.