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.
My last post, about the slapfight between William Shatner and RLM fans, contained a passage perhaps intemperate: More to the point, I think people who do fill their house with junk and go to such conventions are spiritually depleted dorks. Am I still a fan? It seems I let my rhetoric get away with me.… Read More On Dorks and Spirits
Never meet your heroes. I’ve mentioned Red Letter Media before. They’re a YouTube channel that discusses film in a serious way, but with lots of jokes – spoonfuls of sugar to make the medicine go down. They’re different from most cinema nerds on YouTube in that they’ve actually undergone the process of making movies themselves… Read More William Shatner, Red Letter Media, and What Everyone Gets Wrong About Fandom
I began reading this book some months ago, out of my growing general interest in aesthetics as such. In earlier posts, I’ve lamented how aesthetics became an academic sophistry rather than a practical philosophy, after spotting Tanner Guzy on Twitter, this seemed just the right tonic. I’ve always been a man who dresses himself and… Read More Aesthetics as Performance: Tanner Guzy’s “The Appearance of Power”
My initial plan was to make changes to this site subtly, but visual issues with the theme required a new look, and when combined with the scale of the changes I’ve made on social media, that became more appropriate. So, in brief, let me relate what’s happening: My Tumblr blogs are deleted. Every Damn CD… Read More The Grand Deletion
Me, Personally, I love the cover. It’s one of my favorites. And in keeping with the spirit of the times and the content of the issue. It’ll be up on Gumroad tomorrow, but if you want it now, well… Become a Patron!
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I had planned to try and view this prior to recording our most recent Shallow & Pedantic podcast, but didn’t get around to it. Nevertheless, with the absorption of all things Shining, it was bound to happen. So we grabbed it at the library and gave it a watch. Sequels are a delicate business. In… Read More Quick Review: Doctor Sleep
This went up on the Patreon last week for subscribers, and went up on iTunes and Spotify not long after. It a podcast in theme of earlier episodes: exploring the gulf between a novel and its film adapation (in this case, The Shining) and what it is that Horror does. There’s some loud mike action… Read More Shallow & Pedantic 4: We All Shine On
Yes, I finally watched it. I’d had a hard time getting into it: first off-put by the banality of “LOL HItler” (World War 2 was eighty years ago), then by being bored during the first half-hour. Frankly, for a film that billed itself as a trangressive comedy, there weren’t nearly enough laughs (the most transgressive… Read More Quick Review: Jojo Rabbit
Content Blues 