Vince Carducci reviews books for PopMatters. He is Assistant Dean in the Office of Academic Affairs at College for Creative Studies, a private art and design school in Detroit.
Features
Tuesday, January 27 2009
Manufacturing Motown
Like the nameplates on the auto industry's productive output, Motown's headline acts were brand identities under which cultural commodities were sold.
Friday, July 27 2007
Confidence Games on Canal Street
Consumers of counterfeit branded products may be dupes or they may be shrewd shoppers, but they are also communicators; people who demonstrate literacy in the meanings attached to certain symbols in the marketplace both of goods and ideas.
Tuesday, July 17 2007
Work, the Sequel
Most people don't have the luxury of choosing to bail from a high-paying job to live the stressed-out, pizza-scarfing life of a grad student.
Thursday, June 1 2006
Free Culture (While Supplies Last)
PopMatters books writer Vince Carducci takes stock of World Book and Copyright Day and other aspects of the global marketplace for ideas.
Tuesday, May 24 2005
Ties That Bind
Carducci tells of his first-hand experience with how the 'power tie' truly ties one in to power.
Columns
Monday, June 28 2010
Confessions of a Political Romantic: Christopher Hitchens' 'Hitch-22'
Hitchens often remarks here on his being a late bloomer, and so it is that some will see the core of Hitch-22 as the story of the author’s inner journey in adulthood from firebrand '60s campus radical to geezery Tory of the Anglo-American variety.
Friday, February 26 2010
Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places
Sociologist Sharon Zukin looks at the forces at play in some of the cooler neighborhoods of New York in this update of Jane Jacobs and the principles of urban revitalization for the 21st century.
Reviews
Friday, November 18 2011
From Highfalutin Academics to Cutting-Edge Street-Level Remixers: 'Cutting Across Media'
Cutting Across Media is a collection of essays by critics and artists that encourages all those suffering from the anxiety of influence to embrace their symptom.
Tuesday, July 26 2011
'The Beach Beneath the Streets': A Pleasant Meander Through the Situationist Labyrinth
McKenzie Wark seamlessly weaves together a dizzying array of sources both vintage and contemporary in this reexamination of the Situationist International.
Monday, May 16 2011
Gentrification and Its Discontents in 'The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn'
As opposed to many studies of postmodern urban redevelopment, Suleiman Osman finds that gentrification in postwar Brooklyn wasn't the work of a cabal of bankers, real estate speculators, and government bureaucrats after all.
Thursday, May 5 2011
'The Bonds of Debt' Constitute a Common Good by Binding Us Inextricably to One Another
The so-called credit crisis has seemingly pushed the world to the brink of disaster. But the problem according to Richard Dienst isn't that we owe too much -- but that we don't owe enough.
Thursday, December 17 2009
Commonwealth by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
In this culmination of the trilogy that began with Empire and continued with Multitude, Hardt and Negri map a space neither private nor public, a realm outside the clutches of global capital.
Blogs
Monday, May 14 2012
Steve Hughes, Washed in Dirt
For a decade and a half, Steve Hughes has published Stupor, a zine that chronicles life in the age of diminished expectations. The newest issue was done in collaboration with international art star (and Björk main squeeze) Matthew Barney.
Tuesday, July 20 2010
'The Detroiters' Captures Motor City Advertising, 'Mad Men' Style
A 50-year-old copy of a pulp fiction novel on advertising in Detroit is the starting point for an investigation into a bit of late 20th-century pop culture.
Thursday, March 18 2010
Re: Reading Chronic City
A second take on the most recent novel by Jonathan Lethem, which was named a New York Times Best Book for 2009.
Friday, February 12 2010
Always Know; Monk Always
Conspicuously absent from PM’s list of the best nonfiction for 2009 is Robin D. G. Kelly’s comprehensive biography of the high priest of bop, Thelonious Sphere Monk.
Thursday, May 7 2009
GM’s ‘Total Confidence’ Ad Campaign
GM's new "Total Confidence" ad campaign doesn't inspire much confidence in this viewer.
