“Humans turned themselves into masters only to find a new way to become slaves.”— Gunther Anders, The Obsolescence of the Human The society depicted in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 movie Brazil is industrial in its aesthetics and institutional in its metaphysics, bureaucratic beyond all hope. Gilliam’s original title for the project was 1984½, in homage to… Continue reading Of Refuse and Refuge: The Downward Spiral
I know you have your giftcards handy, and you’re looking for something new to read. In these times, I often think about books everyone’s supposed to read. I’ve read some of them. Many are damn good and on the list for a reason, but some need to be avoided like carbs or fat or sugar.… Continue reading Firing the Canon: Read This, Not That!
When I started discovering music on my own, Sonic Youth was already a band with records out. In that sense, I don’t know a world without them. I once wrote that they weren’t a band, that they were an institution. One could say the same about Kim Gordon. Her presence in the band and her… Continue reading Kim Gordon: Femme Fearless
In her book The Social Machine (MIT Press, 2014), Judith Donath outlines designs for living online. Echoing George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), she writes, “We are embodied beings, who have evolved in the physical world; our thoughts and imagination are rooted in the sensory experience of our physical surroundings. Online, there is no body;… Continue reading Contested Boundaries and Saturated Selves
Sometime in the year since reading Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls, I noticed that I’d been reading a lot of books written by women. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but looking back, it struck me as notable. But just as there are two kinds of racism, there are two kinds of sexism: noting the difference… Continue reading Writing Women: Don’t Care If You Like It
