Oddball media crit--laying siege to academia's ivory tower from pop culture's gutter
Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone reboot is a bizarre time capsule of issues liberals said they cared about in 2019. Just five years on, many of them seem unspeakable at the highest level of politics. What insights into this rapid about-face can we glean from its first season?
Hey, you see the recent output from Jon McNaughton, painter of all values traditional and all aesthetics that uphold the Western Tradition? Yeah, is it just me or is it starting to look a little... you know... degenerate?
Isn't it weird how many stories lately feature villains trying to tap into alternate or simulated realities to reunite with loved ones? Let's take a tour of this multiverse full of dead relatives and what they have to say about our cultural moment.
Our culture is saturated with superhero stories, but as those stories turn towards action adventure narratives it's up to a detective story and an epic vampire horror serial to ask "just what is a hero?"
The Auteur as a figure in entertainment is dead. Grown strong on digital production, a more artistically bankrupt creature emerges in their place. It is the Executive Auteur, and it's coming soon to a theater near you, whether you like it or not.
The seasonal countdown of horror movies continues, with werewolves as romantic metaphor, the horror of adolescence, and a bunch of films whose place on this list is real unstable.
Over the last few years, I've watched close to 100 horror movies.
Now, to escape the nightmare of the holidays, I'm ranking them. All of them.
A single joke tweet dropped pharma giant Eli Lilly's stock value by $15,000,000,000. Inside the aesthetics and strategies of Parafiction: the hoax as activist art.
Content warnings for: discussion of anti-queer violence, chemical spills, medical oppression, corporate malevolence.
Prometheus was supposed to be Ridley Scott's triumphant return to making films about Aliens. Instead, we got a film full of necromancers, ghosts, and zombies. What can we make of this frustrating, tantalizing film?
The anime Dance Dance Danseur dwells on the angst of conforming to standards of performance--of art, and of gender. Why does its protagonist seek out the pain of classical ballet training?
As generations age out of our youth valorizing culture, but find no purchase in our political gerontocracy, what form does the art of those too old to rock and roll and too young to die take?
AI art is here. How the hell are artists actually supposed to respond? If proposed answers all feel like dead ends, maybe it's time to look beyond art: to politics.
As AI advances, the hype machine advances faster. Its boosters and detractors agree: AI Art can grant all your wishes. This hyperbolic discourse hides the truth about our tech-mediated culture: we're being sold cheap knockoffs of our desires.
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