Two good LARB essays on the Disney behemoth as represented by Marvel. The first is too intricate to boil down smoothly, but I do want to make a point of its use of "megatelevision," as I think that gets at the appeal of these things with surprising exactness. The second complements the first by comparing Marvel films to Game of Thrones, each series enviously eyeballing the other's medium of choice. Why does TV continue to haunt the consumer unconscious in an era of discontinuous, multimedia entertainment options? What does TV's persistence actually mean in the face of easy assumptions about attention spans, consumer malleability, and changing media environments?
Finally got around to this great Max Read article about the vertiginous cliffside of Internet unreality.
More by Read, this time generating some suggestive possibilities about cinema in a post-cinematic age.
From Girish: tough stuff by Lillian Gish, and a broader reassessment of her legacy after a cinema was stripped of her name.
Eternal reminder: no matter what wrongs other nations may or may not be perpetrating, the US has no credibility as a mediator or enforcer in their affairs.
It's been a week since I've returned from Malaysia, and I remain haunted by a sign I was confronted with upon arrival in the airport. Something to the effect of MALAYSIA IMPOSES THE DEATH PENALTY FOR ILLEGAL DRUG POSSESSION. I was carrying pharmaceuticals at the time, and even though I knew rationally that they weren't the kind of drugs warned against, paranoia crept in at the edges of my consciousness. In that context, it's rather a relief to see Malaysia will be updating its drug policies soon.
"The new left economics" comes as a welcome challenge to neoliberalism, yet I feel like Beckett's point about the possibility of it saving capitalism from itself is one worth further deliberation. Tellingly, the rock star economists quizzed at the end of this essay seem flustered when confronted with the idea, sure as they are that worker-led local businesses are the silver bullet we've been needing for decades. I can't blame them for their pragmatism, but, as usual, revolution is a truer reckoning with the profound injustices being faced.
Robin James is excellent as always dissecting the gendered undercurrents of Taylor Swift's new song and MV.
The origin story of Grab, a Malaysian rideshare app on which we depended heavily during our trip.
Great work by Kelley Dong on self-efficacy and its absence from kids' movies.
On the impossibility of depicting creativity (and why we try anyway).
It looks like I've been subliminally heeding Bifo's call to resist capitalism by relaxing and enjoying yourself. Trouble is, while there's nothing wrong with luxuriation in and of itself, it's a way of life that tends toward regression and complacency. The better action is to fight back with our imperfect psyches, constructing a future rather than endlessly savoring the present. It's a hard truth for me to face, but who better than Malcom Harris to make the case?
The young generation is falling apart financially.
Boeing will live to fly another day.
Out-of-control wildfires are never going to stop.
An insightful essay from Another Gaze about the Millennial Woman archetype, whose individual resilience (cf. Robin James!) or lack thereof takes the spotlight away from collective power/consciousness. Well-written and closely observed, this has the potential to guide a lot of thinking about the functions of 21st century fiction.
Sure, why not? More by James, an older post that nevertheless seems likely to build a bridge toward her upcoming book The Sonic Episteme. I do have trouble with sound/music studies, which doesn't arrive as intuitively to me as audiovisual thinking, but this is a good primer to what I expect will be a very exciting read.
It took us about three years to actually go inside downtown's Lexington Market, and now that we've found our own treasures there (Blue Island!), along come some notorious developers to transform it into something far worse than what it is now. What's really awful is that the residents already know this means gentrification and are confronting the supposed 'community outreach' team about it, yet there's little chance anything substantive will come from these deserved criticisms. Developers never want to hear that their projects will negatively affect the people they claim to be helping.
