St. Cthulu in the Anthroposcene
...How does such a definition come to take hold, when the culture it emerges from is filled with very explicit accounts of horror, from the zombie film to the serial...
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...
The Souls of Ivy Folk
...invitation with a torrent of JPEGs tagged with commentary on rape culture, on the allegations against him, and further lambasting his hypocritical respectability politics. I have no idea what he...
Reality Fiction
...to me that maybe inadvertently you sort of put yourself into the literary tradition. SH: I guess all of us were watching TV. And it felt like the whole culture,...
Lessons From a New History of ACT UP: An Interview with Sarah Schulman
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power began as a revolutionary liberation movement––so what happened?
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...
The Devil’s Playground
On wondering over sexual memory, and the pressure to conform to dominant narratives of violation
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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.