In his latest series of documentaries Can’t Get You Out of My Head (reviewed by Guy Rundle in Arena Quarterly No. 6), sociologist and filmmaker Adam Curtis focuses on a number of individuals who sit at the uneasy intersection of modern individualism, an increasingly technologised vision of the human mind and human behaviour, and a liberatory politics denuded of grand historical narratives. Key portraits in this gallery include the US rapper Tupac Shakur, who attempts to recreate in music something of the political radicalism of his mother (the Black Panther Afeni Shakur) but finds himself trapped by celebrity culture, and the countercultural author Kerry Thornley, who sought to satirise conspiracy thinking, only to succumb to it in later life. But perhaps the most interesting figure of all, in terms of the ideological positioning of the contemporary ‘mainstream’ radical left, is the transgender activist Julia Grant, whose story Curtis glosses in an article for the Guardian … [More here.]