The Wave of Things
The Ukrainian city of L’viv was the birth place of several important people, like Polish chemist and pharmacist Ignacy Łukasiewicz, the inventor of the modern kerosene lamp, or philosopher and science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem. Among them is the revolutionary Austrian writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch. There is a theme bar
After my first article about Polish coldwave/zimna fala (One Million Bulgarians, Psychoformalina, Made in Poland, Madame) I got a lot of positive feedback from you. At this point I would like to express my gratitude for that. I was also reminded that I forgot some of the important coldwave bands
Young Mick Jagger once said he would rather die before still playing ‘Satisfaction’ live when being 60. Many bands had a real hit in their history, by which they are measured ever after. This can be very annoying for a musician. Also new wave spawned a couple of stereotypical songs.
The term ‘coldwave’ recently re-appeared as a label for post-punk influenced music, which embraces a dark, gothic-like aesthetic. But what can be found behind this ambiguous term? The article on hand will outline the history of coldwave in general and then the development of a coldwave movement in Poland.
This article is part of a series about memes in popular culture. If you don’t know yet, what memes and memetics are, you will find the answer in part 1 and part 2. One of the most successfully spread memeplexes, which could be seen as a prototype of how culture
This article is part of a series about memes in popular culture. If you don’t know yet, what memes and memetics are, you will find the answer in part 1. Over a long period in human history memes were spread orally. Only the most successful memes survived then. A first
In 1976 Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’ in his book The Selfish Gene and by that caused a revolution in thinking in several fields, most notably in sociobiology and sociology. Although often criticised the term stayed and became a concept to work with. His theory of memetics has since
The term ‘subculture’ is in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies defined as a group of people within a culture, which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong (Samovar 1998: 50). In other definitions the term ‘co-culture’ is preferred, “because it calls attention to the idea of dual
In the second article about Steampunk I discussed the narratives of combining man and machine and the attraction of this topic within the Steampunk culture. In the following I will outline another interesting aspect of Steampunk: The re-writing, appropriation and continuation of fairy-tales.
The Steampunk culture focuses strongly on technical attributes. In a D.I.Y. manner many people, dedicated to the Steampunk aesthetic, try to create diverse gadgets as eye-candy on their outfits or even to re-build modern life tools mechanically or with steam-power. When talking about this topic, we must not forget that