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A D Jameson & the Avant-Garde
I. I’ve been writing exclusively in long-form the past twelve months and become exhausted. Simultaneously, my writing has become more self-conscious, self-reflexive, and unwieldy, constant over-qualifications and anxious tangentials interrupting its focus. The list format used here, inspired partly by HTMLGiant’s trademark bullet-point style, is both a way to relieve this long-form burnout and to…
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Art As Engineering
A Conversation with Gabriel Duquette and The Sublemon Gabriel Duquette is a co-founder of Liposuction (tagline “aesthetics without all the fat”). He started the site with The Sublemon, who studied art at Yale before contributing to Carcinistion and Ribbonfarm. Both are interested primarily in “retro-engineering” and applying “epistemic hygiene” to matters of taste and aesthetics.…
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Genre, Values Hierarchies, & Intentionality in Pop
I. Does intentionality matter? Critical consequentialism put to the ultimate test: David Cooper Moore’s “The Scary, Misunderstood Power of a ‘Teen Mom’ Star’s Album” discusses Farrah Abraham’s infamous pop record My Teenage Dream Ended: It’s tempting to consider My Teenage Dream Ended alongside other reality TV star vanity albums, like Paris Hilton’s excellent (and unfairly…
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Chekhov’s Gun and Red Herrings: Meaning, Rules, and Transgression in Storytelling
I. “If I think of somebody telling a story, I see a group of people huddled together, and around them a vast space, quite frightening.” — John Berger It’s probably important to start off by quickly distinguishing between a “story” and “literature,” at least in a way that is, if not universally true, at least…
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Camera Obscura’s Let’s Get Out of This Country
Camera Obscura’s breakthrough Let’s Get Out of This Country was released ten years ago this June. Had I known of the record at the time, it would likely have been relegated to the category of guilty pleasure: something to be listened to but not shared; something enjoyable but not worthy. Rock music, especially after a nineties-alt makeover, was still…
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Our Brand Could Be Your Life
1. Belgian metafictionist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, like many of his postmodern peers, focuses the attention of his novels not just on their immediate stories but on how stories in general operate: the ways that truth and artifice intersect or overlap, and how narrators can bias narrative or vice-versa. In Bodega Bay’s debut LP Our Brand Could Be…
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How To Leave Town
“I don’t think it’s possible to make art that makes sense to people if you don’t spend some time doing normal things,” Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo wrote earlier this week in response to an anonymous Tumblr fan question (echoing David Foster Wallace’s now-infamous quote to David Lipsky about treasuring his “normal-guyness”). To both Wallace and Toledo’s work, establishing…
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Oh Boy: Christopher Owens, Headspace, and Artistic Irony
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about two songs in my record collection. One is Jimmie Rodgers’ “T.B. Blues,” considered by some musicologists (e.g. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor) to be one of the first popular autobiographical songs. Rodgers made a career out of singing songs about other people—miners, gamblers, gunslingers, jailbirds. But in 1931,…