Rogueish
Power Loss – The New Inquiry→
05/23/13
Couldn’t help but think about left wing calls for detailed planning of a post-capitalist society when reading this article on right wing survivalists.
Choosing Minecraft Over Disney — Editor's Picks — Medium→
05/22/13
It’s odd, the positive appreciation of Minecraft here looks like it involves a confidence in children’s powers of creativity, but the accompanying negative view of TV exhibits an extremely condescending estimation of children’s critical abilities, as if they are simply passive sponges who will repeat whatever they see on TV. And, there’s this sentence: “Let my sweet impressionable kid spend a day with China on AntFarm or Alex on Wizards of Waverly Place and my parental battles erupt.” Is there not something narrow and limiting about insisting that your children must always be “sweet”?
Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender by Rhian E Jones – review | Books | The Guardian→
05/19/13
I sort of admire John Harris’s attempt to fashion an entire career by endlessly writing the “where have all the protests songs gone?” article. His complaint always appears to be that, as a man who chooses to listen exclusively to shit music, all the music he hears is shit. And this article fails to mention Girls Aloud, so its argument is obviously invalid.
05/19/13
It turns out it’s light streaming through missing ceiling panels but when I first saw this, I thought they’d made a giant communist disco ball.
(Source: cjwho)
Bestselling writers know that image counts | Books | guardian.co.uk→
05/19/13
Yet there’s a jeering tone whenever reviewers pick up on what Langdon wears – invariably a turtleneck, khaki trousers and loafers with the jacket, whatever the context – that suggests a lack of appreciation of what Brown is doing…. Langdon’s taste for tweed in all weathers…says several things about him: that he’s a don, and a little stuffy and old-fashioned; more European than American in his interests and ways.
Wait, you’re saying that Dan Brown has his protagonist wear tweed in order to create the impression that he is an academic? My god, without John Dugdale to decode these avant-garde literary techniques, we’d never understand Brown’s oeuvre.
Fall schedule analysis: See, The CW's schedule makes sense once you realize Mary, Queen of Scots, was a vampire | TV | Newswire | The A.V. Club→
05/17/13
If you don’t get why they would schedule The Vampire Diaries and the show about teenaged Mary Queen of Scots on the same night, I really don’t think you’re qualified to be talking about CW’s programming decisions.
The Great Gatsby - review | Film | The Guardian→
05/16/13
This is a movie whose adjective is unearned. It’s a flashy Gatsby, a sighing Gatsby, an angry Gatsby, a celeb Gatsby. But not a great one.
Erm…
05/15/13
This domain of the less than rational bounds the figure of human reason, producing that “man” as one who is without a childhood; is not a primate and so is relieved of the necessity of eating, defecating, living and dying; one who is not a slave, but always a property holder; one whose language remains originary and untranslatable. This is a figure of disembodiment, but one which is nevertheless a figure of a body, a bodying forth of a masculinized rationality, the figure of a male body which is not a body…. This figuration of masculine reason as disembodied body is one whose imaginary morphology is crafted through the exclusion of other possible bodies…. The body that is reason dematerializes the bodies that may not properly stand for reason or its replicas, and yet this figure is in crisis, for this body of reason is itself the phantasmatic dematerialization of masculinity, one which requires that women and slaves, children and animals be the body, perform the bodily functions, that it will not perform.
― Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 49
Ghostface Killah - Rise Of The Black Suits
05/14/13
Even more than Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II, the new Ghostface album feels rather like a lovingly handcrafted heritage Wu-Tang replica. Which is not entirely a bad thing, obviously.
