Michael R. Barrick

Last night I finally dug into a long overdue task: clearing out several banker's boxes of material retained from my university days. When I was in university the commercialization of the Internet was in its infancy, and the web was only just invented. State of the art when I graduated was at 14.4 modem and Netscape 1.1. The idea of conveniently calling up "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" or ""The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in a fraction of a second when ever one desired was unthinkable. So I kept everything for reference. I had boxes full of photocopied articles of inscrutably dense Modernist and Postmodernist theory that I was sure I would want to reference along with my own painfully sophomoric hand-written essays that I was certain were of lasting brilliance. I also squirrelled away some delightfully bizarre bits of pop-culture and souvenirs like old rave flyers and tickets, the 'zine I put out in the 80's and whatnot. Most of it has now been relegated to the garbage, but some of was too kitschy to pitch. As time permits I will have to share some of best/worst of it here.