They Shoot Oscars, Don’t They?
The Oscar ceremony has finally acquired an ideal twenty-first century host in the smirking, tap-dancing, bland-faced Seth MacFarlane.
Whores’ Glory
The reaction to a new film about sex workers tells us more about liberal reviewers than the workers themselves.
Truth Told Through Lies
Zero Dark Thirty is a film that didn’t need to be made — it strives for realism, but ends up rehashing Bush-era tropes about the ‘war on terror.’
Vague Strategy and Strategic Vagueness
There’s a reason designers describe their field in abstract terms.
The Novel as Dictator
Why socialist realism loses out to avant-garde aesthetics.
Reality T.V. and the Flexible Future
After every long day at the office I go home to face my addiction: watching other people work. Whether I’m gritting my teeth as elderly miners crawl through a tunnel to chip out coal, or cracking up as drag queens scurry to complete missions assigned by RuPaul (catch-phrase: “You better work!”), there’s nothing I’d rather do after a two-hour commute than watch reality television.
Sex House and the Refusal to Fuck
The problem for reality TV is that real life is too dull to make compelling TV, but compelling TV is obviously contrived.
Breuckelen Gentry
While bad gentrifiers see themselves as having little impact on their environment – they are simply maximizing their own self-interest by getting a good deal in an up-and-coming neighborhood – good gentrifiers are supremely aware of their privileged place in the urban food chain, and sometimes even feel guilty about it.
Designing Culture
Design plays a central role in cultural reproduction. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, for anyone.
Want to hear a really pretentious definition of design? Probably not, but I have to listen to this stuff almost constantly and misery loves company, so here it is: “Giving form to culture.
V.S. Naipaul and the American Right
Naipaul’s career developed at a time when Western reactionary intellectuals could still be formidable, dynamic and unpredictable; there was space carved out on the Right for reactionary talent like Naipaul.
Culture
