J.D. Salinger developed perhaps the most resonant and pervasive portrait of a rebellious youth in the post-war period. That conceptual personage, embodied by the textual life of Holden Caufield, has informed the aesthetic spheres of not only other literary works but also music, film, and visual art. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye is [Read More]
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After earning the Palme d’Or from the 2009 Cannes Film Festival jury, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon has somewhat implausibly garnered the attention of the mainstream film community, so far winning the 2010 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Picture as well as being nominated for the same category in the upcoming Academy Awards. Implausibly, because Haneke is a director of stringent artistry and hardly in line with the fluff material that typically adorn the film industry’s requisite ceremonies of glamour. The White Ribbon has already been hailed as Haneke’s masterwork, but it is only because, in a curious way, it is an immediately accessible film, gripping and (seemingly) [Read More] Electronic writing is defined as any writing that is “digital born,” or writing that is meant to be read on a screen, or something other than paper. Electronic writing can also refer to any writing that seeks to address how technology has impacted our lives and our relationship to language, such as twitter poems, wiki novels, GPS blog books. [Read More]
In 1999 Credo Mutwa, a Zulu shaman, told the world of his people’s legend of how fresh water came to the Earth. In the legend a “terrible star” called Mu-sho-sho-no-no came very near the Earth, flipping it “upside down,” in a wild deluge of molten tar and mountain-high waves of water. The star, [Read More]
Port O’ Brien’s latest release, Threadbare, is an album in epistolary form. Its success in capturing the genre – with its poignant and sometimes hysterical mix of the intimate and the confessional – sent me on a quest to find more albums of a correspondent [Read More]
If I had prescient powers about the future course of cutting edge, underground music I would predict the emergence of experimental audiovisual performances in the 2010s (the tens?). In the age of Youtube, where music videos amount to bite-sized clips posted and traded on internet magazines just like this one, there just [Read More]
Milton “Bill” Cooper, when he is reckoned with at all, is usually reckoned with for his tell-all book, Behold A Pale Horse, in which he details 60 years of CIA/NSA coverup of the United States government’s contact with extraterrestrials. To what extent has the United States kept its contact with aliens a secret? [Read More] The music of Brazil has had an indelible influence on modern musicians in ways that are still being properly tallied by music scholars and the public. Every style of music from the jazz work of Stan Getz in the early 60′s, the Brazilian fusion of Airto Moreira in the 70′s, to the New York No-Wave [Read More]
In terms of cultural saliency, the term “outsider music” is no match for its cousin “outsider art.” There’s never been a Simpson’s episode about outsider music, for example. Maybe it’s that it’s harder to escape the musical mainstream than the artistic establishment; maybe it’s that musicmaking is a more populist [Read More] Last Tuesday more Haitians died in an earthquake than were killed by the murderous Papa Doc Duvalier in his 14 year reign. Countless structures were destroyed and the threat of disease is rising. If you haven’t already done it, you can text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross, or text [Read More] |
 How Does The Net Affect our Brains? Nicholas Carr and A Glimpse into the DebateIn 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. [Read More]  Sanullim: Mountain Echo PsychSanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon. [Read More]  We are Freak (Rap)By Adri Wong The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC? [Read More]  ‘The Housemaid’ – A Comparison of Two Korean FilmsIf Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. [Read More]  Film Review: The Secret in their Eyes (El Secreto de sus Ojos) dir. by Juan Jose CampanellaThe Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]    |
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