Recently I went on a quick camping trip and happened to take along my copy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It included some selections from Conrad’s “Congo Diary”, a record he kept of his 1890 journey into the Belgian Congo, events of which clearly informed the subsequent story. This made for an immersive diversion… Read More Books Fall Apart: Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad
Initially I had planned to have a Content Blues podcast hosted here on the blog, but because I don’t have a WordPress Business Plan and don’t intend to shell out for one, that won’t be happening. Instead, I switched to Spreaker as a distribution service for both this and the Shallow & Pedantic Podcast. The… Read More Whatever: The Vast Confederate Lighthouse
158 pages, three years of fantastic wierdness, $5. How can you go wrong? Other than by not using the discount code “ujsingle” for $1 off, I mean.
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
I don’t know what caused Penguin to introduce a Great Ideas series, or by what criteria they determine what ideas are great. I do know that I read Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life, and I enjoyed the packaging as much as the philosophy (Stoicism is a useful ethos, but hard to expand upon. It’s… Read More Notes on Ruskin: The Geography of Gothic
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
What you’re looking at here is the standalone stories from Volumes 2, 3, and 4 of Unnamed Journal. These include some very weird tales and some hilarious pieces as well. We’ve got Kaiser Wilhelm yelling at his generals in “How I’m Pretty Sure World War I Started”. We’ve got a strange love affair with a… Read More The Singles Collection is Here!
{The following was first written for my defunct Medium.com account in 2012. In some sense it has been overtaken by events. The success of the indie film Bone Tomahawk, among others, in some sense supports my premise. And the points it has to make about the nature of the Western, especially as against the Noir,… Read More Beyond Cowboys and Indians
The ease of digital recording has made it fun to collaborate with yourself. All of these were made on Garageband, which is to say, they’re me on Guitar and bass, with drum fills borrowed. The exception is the opener, “Do Another One, Dad” which was just a series of fills created with the AuxyPro app… Read More More Noise on Bandcamp – A New Duke Bike Rider EP
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 