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    Censorship Now!!
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    Censorship Now!!
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    Censorship Now!!
    Ebook197 pages3 hours

    Censorship Now!!

    By Ian F. Svenonius

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "While putting a copy of this book on your nightstand would be a sign of good taste, who cares about good taste? Are you willing to be seen reading a book titled Censorship Now!! in public? If so, your skin might burn with funny glances from squares, scolds and looky-loos. But on the inside, you'll feel your brain throbbing as it swells to accommodate some hilarious, absurd and radical new strategies on how to live in our ridiculous world."
    --Washington Post

    "Svenonius' new book is Censorship Now!!, and the title alone shows just how provocative the author can be. A collection of essays previously published by Vice, Jacobin, and others, it sets up numerous enemies--both real and straw--for Svenonius to knock down....It's all couched in a style that's part anarchist tirade, part postmodern critique, and part punk-rock snottiness--yet it's addictively ridiculous."
    --NPR

    "Censor it all. Film, TV, music, politics, books, news, art--censor all of it. That's the guiding principle of local radical punk Ian Svenonius' latest essay collection, Censorship Now!!"
    --Washington City Paper, Critics' Pick

    Named a Favorite Book of 2015 by Jason Diamond at Vol. 1 Brooklyn

    "Gonzo ecstasy for those who have come to know Svenonius's self-aware political meditations....And though the essays Svenonius writes are not themselves unclear, the process of talking about what he's written involves discussions that some might find uncomfortable. His books make more sense the more you dissect them. So keep them in your back pocket and read them, one word at a time."
    --Los Angeles Review of Books

    "A new collection of essays by everyone's favorite supercilious rock theorist...Svenonius has always been the smartest kid in the room....In print, Svenonius is like that curmudgeonly pal that you adore because, even while his insight quivers between humor, paranoia, and antisocial ire, he never dispels your fascination in how he gets there."
    --SF Weekly

    "Ian Svenonius is best known as the frontman of bands like the Make-Up and Nation of Ulysses, but he's also a brilliant cultural critic with a talent for coming up with the hottest takes you'll ever read. In this collection, Svenonius makes compelling arguments in favor of censorship and hoarding books and records, amid polemics against Apple and Ikea, the yuppification of indie rock, and the shaving of pubic hair."
    --Buzzfeed

    "The essays in Censorship Now!! are equally packed with modest proposals and mock-revolutionary rhetoric, but there are grains of truth in pieces like 'The Historic Role Of Sugar In Empire Building' and 'Heathers Revisited: The Nerd's Fight For Niceness'--they're just buried somewhere between tongue and cheek."
    --The A.V. Club

    "Censorship Now!! simultaneously deals in the heated rhetoric of insurgent calls to action, the seductive broad strokes of propaganda, and the clever winking of surrealist humor. Often when I'm really convinced Svenonius has gone off a paranoid deep end, the next sentence hits back with knowingly-hilarious exaggeration or profoundly spot-on analysis, realigning my perspective and making me wonder again....It's fitting that a book whose intentions are ambiguous begins with a call to censor art and ends by letting art do the talking."
    --Pitchfork

    Ian F. Svenonius's new collection of sixteen essays and stories, entitled Censorship Now!!, is reorganizing people's ideas about censorship, Ikea, documentary filmmaking, the Berlin Wall, the film Heathers, the twist, the frug, the mashed potato, shaving one's body, Apple, Inc., Nordic functionalism, the supposed benevolence of the Wikipedia, hoarding, college rock, the origins of the Internet, and more. It's an underground smash which has been met with a horrified gasp in all respectable quarters and gog-eyed enthusiasm in arti

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateNov 3, 2015
    ISBN9781617754258
    Unavailable
    Censorship Now!!
    Author

    Ian F. Svenonius

    Ian F. Svenonius is the author of the underground best sellers Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock 'n' Roll Group and Censorship Now!! He was also the host of VBS.tv's Soft Focus, a different breed of chat show, where he interviewed Mark E. Smith, Genesis P. Orridge, Chan Marshall, Ian MacKaye, and others. As a musician he has created more than twenty albums and countless singles in various rock 'n' roll combos (Chain & the Gang, Weird War, The Make-Up, The Nation of Ulysses, etc.). He lives in Washington, DC.

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    Reviews for Censorship Now!!

    3/5

    21 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      Not the biggest fan. I didn't find it terribly funny. Certainly not for everyone.
    • 1/5
      Ian Svenonius obviously thinks he's clever. The back of the book reads, "Instructions: Read one word at a time." Based on that and the description of the book as "an uproarious new essay collection," I assumed I was about to read something humorous, or at least a bit snarky. Perhaps it might even mean "uproarious" in the more general sense of something that will cause an uproar, and I was about to read something mildly shocking.No, no, and no.When I started reading the first chapter, I had to double check that this was not a mistake - these rambling, poorly-written paragraphs really were intentionally included in the book. Okay, fine. I forced my way through it, failing to find the part at which Svenonius comes to a point of any sort, and set out on chapter two.Chapter one must have been a fluke, I thought. There is simply no way anyone could write an entire book as bad as that first chapter.Dear God, was I ever wrong. The first six pages of chapter two contain at least a dozen conspiracy theories. That wouldn't be so bad, except each of them is so poorly thought out, and Svenonius doesn't even attempt to justify his logic for a single one. He just drops them in, left and right, as if DUH, EVERYONE KNOWS DANCING IN THE 1960S WAS A MASS PLOT TO KILL INTIMACY BETWEEN COUPLES AND USHER IN A DIGITAL AGE OF ISOLATION.On top of his (many, many, oh so many) rantings on all of his conspiracy theories, even just his basic facts are almost always incorrect. That's okay, though, because he doesn't even try to pretend that he did any research anyway! Again, in just the first six pages of chapter two, he gives incredibly wrong information about the history of birth control, the history of dancing, the history of rock n roll music, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. And I'm not even talking about the insane conclusions he forms on these subjects; just the basic facts he uses to get to those conclusions are also wildly inaccurate.In short, this book is a collection of long, rambling, poorly-written, ill-thought-out conspiracy theory rants.
    • 3/5
      Satire: the use of humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices. This book is not for everyone. But even if you only gain a couple of interesting insights or tweaks in your usual thought process, you've come out ahead, in my opinion.
    • 2/5
      There is an audience out there (way, way out there) for this book. That audience is not me unfortunately. To be honest I did not read this book cover to cover. I skipped around instead and read the essays that looked interesting to me. Then I went back and tried to read the rest of the essays and I gave up. They rambled on and on and I found it difficult to focus.
    • 4/5
      My word, what a clever fellow. And yet, I wonder if we could be friends? He looks rather a serious chap. And no wonder if the ideas contained in this book are what fills his head. I'm sure I'd be not a little sour and grave as well. I'm glad that there are people like him to think of these things and inform the rest of us. My brain isn't equipped to retain the vast knowledge or to make the connections he does, but I am so glad he does. He expounds on everything from communism to tipping to pubic hair; from sugar to gentrification to Apple; from Heathers to racism to art. He appears to me to know a lot on nearly everything and sprinkles it all quite liberally with music, musicianship, censorship, and rock 'n' roll (among other genres). It's truly a wonder to me. I imagine a conversation between the two of us going something like this:IFS: "The elite seek to program, dupe, hypnotize, control you--who they regard as their property, their "bitch"--through these proxy singers. Censor them!! Don't let them talk to that way."Me: (eyes wide with awe) Yessss ...IFS: "The cyberlords have already convinced us that maps, paper, pens, and even push buttons are somehow incredibly inconvenient and clumsy, leaving us scraping and pawing like drooling bug life on their flat and sleek digital dildos."Me: (look of deep concern on my face as I realize I am drooling bug life and will never look at my phone the same again) Ohhhh ...IFS: "George Clinton's group(s) Parliament-Funkadelic outlined the all-out war they were waging via a metaphorical villain, 'Sir Nose D'Void of Funk,' who had been 'pimplifying (the people's) instincts' until they were 'fat, horny, and strung out.' Parliament, building on Sun Ra's sci-fi vision, explained that funkateers were pitted in a cosmic battle against unfunky forces who use 'the placebo effect' to put people in the 'nose-zone' of 'zero funkativity'. Clinton explained in 'Mothership Connection' that Dr. Funkenstein's champion 'Star Child' would use his bop-gun to spread 'funkentelechy.' an antidote to consumerism and alienation."Me: (huge, dawning smile lights up my face, lips parted, inhaling) Oh, how delightful!At this point in the conversation, Mr. Svenonius would probably walk away bewildered and justified.Make no mistake, there is not an ounce of sarcasm in my wonderment of this author and his abilities. I marvel at his breadth of genius. Certain of my friends will be getting this book for Christmas (which thought immediately illicits a guilty feeling of consumerism and irony in me.)
    • 3/5
      While this collection of humorous, satirical essays is written in a very intelligent manner, I found it difficult to remain focused on what I was reading. I often found myself lost in the vocabulary. Another problem may be my age. I found some of the references to modern popular culture to be unfamiliar to me. (I'm not that old, only 54! Still, I have never followed punk rock or hip hop.) My favorite essay was the first one on censorship. I found that most of them related somehow to music, and I didn't find those as interesting. There is an audience for this collection, but I don't think I'm included in it. Still, I appreciate the thought and intelligence behind the writing.
    • 2/5
      This collection of rambling essays is written in a break-neck tone that conjures the author as a hair-pulling junkie lecturing from the gutter. At first I marveled that anyone could create such a realistic portrayal of the paranoid, over-drugged mind. Then I began to wonder if the author was serious and this book was not a collection of ironic essays meant to be humorous.Either way, the essays were humorous - at least some of them were. I laughed aloud a few times as I read about Apple's collusion with Ikea to simultaneously strip society of all physical possessions and destroy emotional attachment. But the essays that focused on the history of punk and how the government is using music and art to control us, my attention waned.I would say it's worth a selective reading, but I certainly wouldn't pay money for such a book. Maybe that's what the author wanted to achieve. Why become a cog in the consumerist machine?
    • 1/5
      Ian Svenonius obviously thinks he's clever. The back of the book reads, "Instructions: Read one word at a time." Based on that and the description of the book as "an uproarious new essay collection," I assumed I was about to read something humorous, or at least a bit snarky. Perhaps it might even mean "uproarious" in the more general sense of something that will cause an uproar, and I was about to read something mildly shocking.No, no, and no.When I started reading the first chapter, I had to double check that this was not a mistake - these rambling, poorly-written paragraphs really were intentionally included in the book. Okay, fine. I forced my way through it, failing to find the part at which Svenonius comes to a point of any sort, and set out on chapter two.Chapter one must have been a fluke, I thought. There is simply no way anyone could write an entire book as bad as that first chapter.Dear God, was I ever wrong. The first six pages of chapter two contain at least a dozen conspiracy theories. That wouldn't be so bad, except each of them is so poorly thought out, and Svenonius doesn't even attempt to justify his logic for a single one. He just drops them in, left and right, as if DUH, EVERYONE KNOWS DANCING IN THE 1960S WAS A MASS PLOT TO KILL INTIMACY BETWEEN COUPLES AND USHER IN A DIGITAL AGE OF ISOLATION.On top of his (many, many, oh so many) rantings on all of his conspiracy theories, even just his basic facts are almost always incorrect. That's okay, though, because he doesn't even try to pretend that he did any research anyway! Again, in just the first six pages of chapter two, he gives incredibly wrong information about the history of birth control, the history of dancing, the history of rock n roll music, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. And I'm not even talking about the insane conclusions he forms on these subjects; just the basic facts he uses to get to those conclusions are also wildly inaccurate.In short, this book is a collection of long, rambling, poorly-written, ill-thought-out conspiracy theory rants.