Trivial Pursuits
...provides an exhaustively researched historical survey of the culture of shoplifting, Rachel Shteir documents how the term has since evolved: In the mid-19th century, kleptomania was linked to melancholy and...
Post-coloniality Sells
...perform wedding ceremonies. To me as an author this present is an incredible moment. We are witnessing syncretic processes of African culture, as a result of clashing with Europe, is...
Thinking bad
...Bolt Back," a tedious rant about Lady Gaga's refusal to be a 1970s glam rocker. After basically complaining that Lady Gaga is dumb and her music stinks, he writes, By...
When Game of Thrones Stopped Being Necessary
...would ask a question like this, putting a television show on (metaphorical) trial for its life, reflects the way pop culture has become a battle-ground on which a variety of...
Cause/Affect
...music. So what happens is that the music is very beautiful, and it creates a certain affect to the text. The manifesto texts are about political issues. And so, because...
Against the Normative World
...times to cry, still compels me deep in my flesh, still vibrates. And I began to wonder years ago: If it were possible to still be moved by the music,...
Obituary: Borders Books and Music
...we’d go from CD-listening station to station, trading headphones, discovering not just bands but popular music itself. We would spend hours, walk out without buying anything, and come back the...
The Missing Medium
...share original compositions using the same plastic instruments they’d used in another context to play a rhythmic button-pushing game. There is a powerful ambiguity here between music being depicted as...
Vinyl re-enchantment
...records I hope to come across some day, but since I can download all this music to actually listen to it, I am more invested in the quest itself than...
Phantom Tollbooths
...progress of anything, and even when unauthorized copies of works undermine the profits of the culture industry, as has happened most obviously to the music business, this does not seem...
Ultra Violence
...and culture. He said “we are like heirs of an emperor, or children of the Lupa [the wolf from the foundational myth of Rome], or the Roman people fierce and...
Super Position
...shows, cartoon series and blockbuster movies ultimately came from. Comic-book superheroes were originally a mid-century phenomenon, and like all mid-century pop culture phenomena, they are essentially Freudian. Umberto Eco once...
Natural's Not In It
...doesn’t provide us with beauty and pleasure in the form of culture, art, music, literature, and, yes, food the way we’ve created it? To deny ourselves the chance to experience...
Vernacular Criticism
...govern choices between the goods of legitimate culture cannot be fully understood … unless ‘culture,’ in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is reinserted into ‘culture’ in the broad,...
Old Bones
...eat you. The T. rex is kind of perfect for the consumer culture of the U.S. Susan Buck-Morrs once said that the communist bloc was a kind of utopia of...
Smash Images from Antiquity
...continues, in voiceover: “The Assyrians, Akkadians, and others took for themselves gods of rain, of agriculture, and of war, and worshipped them along with Allah, and tried to appease them...