Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Enjoyed chatting with Adam + Kyle of Zer0 for this vidcast dedicated to the new Zer0 Classics edition of Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life. Excuse my gruffness - I was recovering from covid when it was recorded. 


I've lost count of the number of Mark-mourning and Kpunk-commemorating things I've done or participated in these last five years and a bit. There was a tribute for a newspaper, a podcast, a foreword to a collection, a live panel, a memorial lecture,  a virtual panel, a conference speech/journal essay, an afterword to a reissue, a keynote speech for a conference done as a video, an interview or two.... possibly other things I'm forgetting. Increasingly, I've felt a bit like a John the Baptist who's somehow managed to outlive the Messiah!

It can be a little uncomfortable if it feels like I'm supposed to be speaking on Mark's behalf, as his earthly representative. It's not like we were joined at the hip ideologically, or even aesthetically. We disagreed (amiably) about quite a lot. In terms of temperament and outlook -  our fundamental orientation towards this thing called Life - there's a gap there.  Still, I always enjoy talking about his work and about him as a person, to the extent that I knew him (I feel others knew him much better, or knew him differently, let's say).  If nothing else, it's a way of keeping Mark in mind.