In Defense of Looting
...Precisely the image that the Ferguson police tried to evoke to assassinate Michael Brown’s character and justify his killing post facto. It is a completely righteous and understandable position. However,...
Artistic autonomy and subsumption
...a feeling of autonomy? What does it even matter if an artwork is autonomous? Doesn't that just mean that the culture has succeeded in depoliticizing it? Is autonomy a form...
A Short History of the Dining Room (Part 1)
...music, and the company was already heated with wine; when the count retired for an instant, drew his sword, and gave the signal of the murder." --Edward Gibbon, The History...
Sunday Reading
...the ambiguities of folklore, history, culture. Names, Trains, and Corporate Deals: Why Public Transit Shouldn’t Sell Naming Rights What to Read Next Batman wins the Cold War Not-quite-lost shadows Imperialistic...
Paranoia lost
...can and probably should investigate anyone, rationalizing a social hermeneutics of suspicion through the provision of the means to execute it. Paranoia is built into the culture, to the extent...
Caruso Sings The Vowels
...The great Enrico Caruso taking us through the vowels as shown in Caruso's Method of Voice Production: the Scientific Culture of the Voice (1922) by Pasqual Mario Marafioti. When...
The Devil’s Playground
On wondering over sexual memory, and the pressure to conform to dominant narratives of violation
Sunday Reading: April 30, 2023
...Silicon Valley demonstrate how venture capital culture trained a generation of people to build and fund apps, not sustainable businesses––and then marry those apps to industries a lot more complex...
Open Channels
...Sue/Marty Stu character. But Cho doesn’t stop at experimenting with different identities—aspects of his own subjectivity go with him, flooding the characters he inhabits. In “The Sound of Music,” for...
Beauty Blogosphere 6.8.12
...the ways that we've transformed celebrities into objects. It's a case study of culture-wide objectification: "Listen, I enjoy pop culture. I like movies and television, and I like pop music,...
Short Circuit
...for popular storytelling in the broad culture and hip storytelling among the cinerati. But for most of us, the film might as well be a tree falling in one of...
Hal
Delayed reflections on Jim Jarmusch and Talal Asad
The Job of Consent
The Joy of Consent: a Philosophy of Good Sex (October 2023) tests the limits of consent as a heuristic for "good sex," exposing the wide berth between pleasure and what is legible to the law.
Secondary Modern
...art to turn in on itself, away from common experience, and to make itself its own subject. Art, thus separated from culture, requires a social elite to support it and...
7 Days of Queer Theory
...With Normal," can kick us off: "The received wisdom in straight culture, is that all of its different norms line up, that one is synonymous with the others. If you...
A Deluxe Apartment in the Sky
...family, whose upper class suburban environment has, he explains in voiceover, caused them “drop a little of [their] culture.” His eldest son favors field hockey over basketball and has adapted...