Comix dude Marc Singer of I Am NOT the Beastmaster blog on Retromania

Singer finds all kinds of parallels in the discourse around comics / graphic novels that parallel the disquiets and gripes of my book:

e.g. Dorian Wright on Steven Moffat's Doctor Who:

"...the people in charge of the show aren’t interested in people who are Doctor Who fans, they’re interested in people who are fans. Full stop. People who are, essentially fans of…being fans. Who just like to be into…things. Because it’s a thing, and God help you if you’re not into it. They want to please that mercurial, fickle, transitory audience that watches an episode and immediately floods the internet with animated gifs and posts on Twitter and Tumblr about their 'feels' about the show and who communicate with one another entirely in references to pop culture ephemera, like that really shitty Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, only with jokes about bronies and t-shirts mashing up Dexter and Game of Thrones."

e.g. Andrew Hickey, following up Wright's points:

"The thinking behind it is precisely the same thinking that is used in every shitty image macro you’ve ever seen, a sort of post-postmodernism for cretins. Take two symbols of “awesome” and bash them together, and generate something more “awesome”. It’s the postmodern technique of collaging signifiers divorced from their context, but with the difference that you must show absolutely no interest whatsoever in investigating any ideas that this juxtaposition might inspire.

[...] The logic of surrealism is not that far from the logic of the tumblr meme, after all — put two familiar things, like a lobster and a telephone, together and see what kind of interference pattern results in our mind. But the choices in this series are from what seems to be a pre-approved list of “awesome” stuff. Film noir detectives and time travel, dinosaurs and spaceships, cyborgs and cowboys, Daleks and ballerinas. The kind of combuination that only the most tediously unimaginative person could ever possibly think was original. No doubt next year we’ll have cats with lasers (inspiring jokes about how now it’s them with the laser pointer), monkeys riding unicorns, pirates eating bacon, and steampunk lesbian sumo wrestlers teaming up with Sherlock Holmes".

Singer himself identifies a parallel between "glutted and clotted"/hyperstasis and "Final Crisis" or indeed projects by "Morrison or Alan Moore or any other creator who's become captured by pop culture's bottomless past", then signs off with a quote plucked from a comic panel (the serial unknown to me, though clearly needing no introduction to the hardcore cognoscenti who read his blog):

"Perhaps, Agent Helligan, when a civilization reaches its peak, there comes a time of harvest, let’s say. After the ripening comes inevitable decay. With predictable and grim implications for your own civilization."

gluttered

FACT's John Calvert on Animal Collective's congested and digi-maxed-out  Centipede Hz, a microcosm of the macrocosm that is netspace (a nonspace of absolute proximity)

"It’s as if by having every tool and style of every era and nation available to them at the press of a button has stripped AC’s world of its mystery; as if there’s nothing more to discover."

"the cost of such a dazzling feast of stimuli has been a certain element of romance.... there’s just no room for the listener’s own imagination, rendering it a difficult album to connect with"

 "with the American indie vanguard migrating over to electronica, a shrinking force in songwriting has been the spaces between guitar music’s adjoining parts. Spaces, or rather negative space, in which mystery burgeoned, where atmosphere and by extension a sense of place formed"

"...  Centipede Hz‘s overarching theme of enmeshed radio signals, spiralling intertwined through space. The hitch is, you never get a sense of that infinite space here, outer or otherwise, because space itself is in short supply... Centipede Hz plays out like another post-indie meditation on information overload in the net-age; where the music, packed and hyper eclectic, is pursuant to the concept. It carries the same tenor of anxious joy struck by ‘post-everything’ icons Gang Gang Dance"

a/k/a glutted and clotted

a/k/a Mourning "Becomes-Eclectic"

it's the Sound of Now (for a certain demographic / class / and it's the reason i can only hack about 20 minutes of KCRW before i have to flip to classic rock radio, flee to the clarity and punch of riff based Old Wave or New Wave