The significance of boredom, as a cultural force, cannot be overstated in the modern age. Our economy and culture revolves to a strong degree on Entertainment, on the manufacture of excitement and drama. When food is plentiful, and most of the necessities of life available, excitement and drama, outside of the struggle to obtain newer… Read More What is More Boring, NPR or Sports-Talk Radio?
What Sign of the Apocalypse is it that we require our button-apps and time-waster devices to remind us that there’s an election coming up? Why isn’t this something I can turn off? It’s everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Twitter. The oligarchy is as One reminding me that I need to Register to Vote. Never mind the… Read More I Know How to Vote, Facebook
An intriquing passage from On Art and Life, which nicely explains the aethetic rut that modern art has fallen into: …that great art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as of every other art, consists in saying new… Read More Notes on Ruskin: Modern Art is Anti-Art
In my wild opinionated youth, I was something of a disdainer. Where other readers and writers widely explored what certain genres had to offer; I tended to stick with the first thing that brought me in the door. I liked Star Wars, and never found another sci-fi world that interested me until I read Heinlein.… Read More Entertainment vs. Edutainment: The New Pulp Narrative
In the last Shallow & Pedantic podcast, I went off on an extended tear on a literary podcast that I used to listen to with great interest, but stopped. I removed the section from the finished product, but I’d like to address it now. A while ago, I became the kind of guy who Listens… Read More Rabbit Riot, or The Mystery of the Missing Micro-Press
This became a minor meme boomlet for a few days last week: Obviously, the first response, the intended response, is laughter. A political meeting is a ridiculous place to discuss what pub food is called. On top of that, you can pull/impose a “commentary on the absurdity of our politics” if you’re in the mood.… Read More The Saucy Nugs Guy and The Treachery of Rhetoric
It seems that people have been left by their education unable to put values in the correct order. People who consider themselves intelligent and sober are defending twerking 11-year-olds for no better reason than to annoy conservatives, because apparently child exploitation doesn’t count if it’s done on the set of a movie in France. Let’s… Read More I Don’t Care If Cuties is a Good Movie
Back in the 90’s, when concepts such as “youth culture” seemed relevant to me, I was known to lament the chokehold Boomers had over pop culture. Every time the same damn Beatles songs were repackaged into a new format, I got incredibly annoyed, especially when someone my age bought it. Looking back, this exercise seems… Read More The Milennial Nostalgia Machine
Movies are a strange art form. They immerse an audience in a world that looks and sounds real, yet we can only access them through two-dimensional screens. We observe them as though we’re part of them, but the Fourth Wall is absolutely inviolable to us (not to the movie itself, mind). We can’t crash them… Read More Why Movies Need Stars
In Ruskin’s On Art and Life, discussion of the features of Gothic archtecture lead to a passage nicely prophetic: From these facts, we may gather generally that monotony is, and ought to be, in itself painful to us, just as darkness is; that an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dead architecture; and of… Read More Brutalism’s Anti-Aesthetic.
Content Blues 