Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
A memoir of New York across five decades — St Marks Place and Thelonious Monk, a SoHo loft when the neighbourhood was still light industry, his father’s painting and Max’s Kansas City, his mother Joyce Johnson’s editing and her year with Kerouac, the downtown clubs, Open City and Rob Bingham, and Collective Hardware as a temporary autonomous zone. Ends on the question of what the city means now that the next big thing is no longer located anywhere.
Written during the 2022 crypto collapse. Pinchbeck separates the speculative wreckage of the NFT market from what he takes to be the durable potential of blockchain tools, and reads both against Walter Benjamin on the aura of the artwork and Joseph Beuys on social sculpture. Covers Tyler Hobbs and generative art, Ethereum’s proof-of-work problem, Beeple and Pak, the Bored Ape economy, the LaMDA sentience episode, and DAOs as a possible successor to the corporation.
An excerpt from How Soon Is Now, then forthcoming from Watkins Press. The passage sets the literary city of Kafka, T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg against Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, then calls for cities rebuilt as what designer John Todd terms scaffoldings for living systems, where food is grown, energy produced, and waste recycled.
Pinchbeck describes the split between creative work and self-promotion, citing his GaiamTV talk show Mind Shift, which he was expected to sell to 1,000 new subscribers, and the years he lost marketing his own company, Evolver. He invokes Lewis Mumford on capitalism and Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism as grounds for arguing that artists should not be their own marketing machines.
Conducted for Codigo, a Mexican art and design magazine, in 2014. Pinchbeck calls for repurposing mass and social media to shift planetary consciousness, citing Jose Arguelles on the sacred function of art, Joseph Beuys on social sculpture, Bernard Lietaer’s Terra currency, and Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics. He mentions his talk show Mind Shift and the film 2012: Time for Change.
A feature written for Origin magazine in June 2012 describing why Pinchbeck founded Evolver Editions with North Atlantic Books, and surveying its first titles. He traces the imprint back to the volume of reader mail his own books generated and the absence of any forum where those readers could speak.
A long interview for Reality Sandwich from June 2011 with William Etundi, Jr., the New York event producer behind The Danger, on his upbringing between a Methodist minister mother and a Ghanaian father, the economics of underground nightlife, and what he took from his first ayahuasca ceremony.
From Pinchbeck’s 2011 Dazed & Confused column. It argues that the hipster is an exhausted construct whose detachment is manufactured by the media industry and serves corporate control, and traces cool from enslaved Africans and jazz musicians to Che Guevara T-shirts. Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated supplies the blob; Antonio Negri supplies the reminder that capital is only a social relation.
Written for Reality Sandwich in May 2010, the essay draws on the self-distribution campaign for 2012: Time for Change with director Joao Amorim and Mangusta Films to argue that independent film is becoming a process rather than a product, citing Peter Gabriel’s subscription model. Pinchbeck faults Facebook’s architecture for blocking deeper discourse and calls for networks designed to raise collective intelligence.