Jess Henderson's Blog, page 2

It Isn’t

This piece was written as part of the Pause for Thought project that I was asked to join during the summer. The workshop assembled writers, researchers, artists, and theorists to discuss the topic of ‘high speed society.’ Read the original here.

Thank you to Scott Wark and Tom Sutherland for the invitation.

It Isn’t

‘…Losing yourself in a boxset vs a text message’, Rebecca Coleman said. When listening to an album front to back rather than a playlist of assembled yet disparate song...

Band of Burnouts Research Lab

An artistic research lab in fellowship with the School of Commons.

Band of Burnouts LAB

Researching in residency with the School of Commons

Band of Burnouts lab

If it seems quiet over here at No Fun that’s because I am in the midst of a 10-month long research residency with the School of Commons. My research lab there is called Band of Burnouts and, as in the name, it is all about burnout. Here is the short ‘about’:

Band of Burnouts is a research lab with the School of Commons undertaking a transdisciplinary study of the burnout in a multi-perspective, multi-voiced exploration of experiences. Focuses of the lab’s research include accounting for the u...

Co-Conspirators: The ‘Rock Revival’ Pow-Wow

In Parts I and II, we traced a line from Kid Cudi to Machine Gun Kelly (MGK)—via SNL—to the revival of pop punk in the US musical mainstream. We ended with the co-conspiracy between MGK and Yungblud to “bring back rock’n’roll.” To round off this cultural commentary on what’s brewing in pop music today, this third part ties up their collaboration and makes a link with Miley Cyrus via the mysterious indications provided by SNL’s selection of musical guests.

As noted in the previous dispatch, MG...

Machine Gun Kelly wants to ‘bring back pop punk’

In Part I, we looked at Kid Cudi’s internet-breaking dress moment on Saturday Night Live (SNL) earlier this month. In Part II, we go further with the SNL musical guests, having noticed something brewing in (American) pop music that hasn’t happened in a long time. It’s strange that the common link here is SNL. Why would a long-running (maybe outdated) comedy sketch and variety show potentially be a present signal, a radar, of what is manifesting within pop music? Though perhaps the question is ra...

Kid Cudi wears a dress. Breaks the internet.

Kid Cudi showed up on Saturday Night Live (SNL) in a dress, and the internet exploded. Presumably this was exciting because it was a man, in a dress. There is a long history of American popular culture misrepresenting trans people with harmful stereotypes, tropes, and appropriating ballroom culture, etc. This appearance by Cudi (or Cudder as he is fondly called by fans) felt like a re-run of a tonne of problems seen before (for an intro to the missteps of American film and TV in portrayals of tr...

Interview: All The Boring Things

The Pen Name newspaper, LA’s best and most insano street rag interviewed me for their Spring/Summer 2021 issue. In the piece, editor-in-chief Jim Padlow and I talk working under pseudonym, the most boring parts of labouring in ‘the creative industries’ today, and dealing with a love/hate relationship to the internet.

Turn to page three of their current online issue , or click for an easy to read PDF version.

Excerpt from The Pen Name newspaper

The Naxos Aphorisms

This summer I had the pleasure of sharing a piece of work that would have otherwise gone discarded with the literary magazine KALEIDOSCOPED of UC San Diego. 

The online magazine’s inaugural issue Unfinished Stories fitted right into the moment, that moment which still continues. 

Editor Becca Rae Rose asked for ‘writing that resists completion, narratives whose endings we don’t or can’t know yet, stories about unresolved issues, or an unresolved story about a finished one… An essay abo...

Dude, Where’s My 22nd Century?

This article was originally published in MARCH Journal of Art & Strategy.

On the Burnout of Future-Images

An overlap between the experience of temporality in the contemporary condition of burnout and time-flow in relation to social change has emerged. There is an intervention to be done, one that speculates on how these two apparently separate concepts have begun to overlap, revealing potentially exciting qualities in one another.

In his book The Image of the Future (1961), Dutc...