01 Introduction/Happy New Year!
16 Difficult Fun, Fast Product founder Bob Last, The Human League and Heaven 17
40 Julie Burchill’s cred-list
42 Difficult Fun, Part II
58 Jean Baudrillard On Nihilism
64 Francisco Cortina on Mexico and Luis Barragán
84 DEVO images by Roland Hepp
91 We’re Not That Good, Dave Eggers
97 Ten personal pages by Fetisch/Terranova
106 Collective representations elicit widespread individual false memories, by Stefania de Vito, Roberto Cubelli, and Sergio Della Sala
110 Timelines 7*1980 & 6*1981
124 Epilogue
126 Acknowledgments
From an interview with Fast records founder and The Human League manager Bob Last:
I went to see this very shit Warhol retrospective in Paris. It’s very difficult to get hold of, on the one hand, his critical thing, and on the other, his groupie-dom and his embracing all these aspirations. It’s a very hard and difficult line to get a handle on.
It’s pop.
Across all the tribes and genres and everything else, that is the essence of what pop is. Once I started working in film––which is utterly embedded in the establishment in a way music just isn’t––that I started encountering people who I seemed to have some common ground with but whose cultural life was entirely within the kind of formal classical tradition. People who would think classical music had a value and would go see plays and things. They were culturally sophisticated, but in my mind they all seemed incredibly naïve and simplistic compared to some kid who might be in a band in his bedroom.
From an essay on the Bologna bombing by Stefania de Vitoa, Roberto Cubelli and Sergio Della Salaa:
On the morning of August 2nd, 1980, at 10.25, a bomb exploded in the main station of Bologna, Italy. 85 people died and over 200 were wounded. A large clock on the outside wall of the main building broke during the explosion. Soon after, it was repaired and continued working for the next 16 years. The picture of the clock with its hands fixed at 10.25 became the symbol of the event, and as such is reproduced on posters and banners during each annual commemoration. In 1996 the clock stopped working, and it was decided to set it permanently at 10.25, as a remembrance symbol. it has been noted anecdotally that people remember the clock as having been always set at the time of the explosion.
Designers: Christopher Roth and Petra Langhammer
