prospectivecritic

[prospectivecritic]

Sexual Abuse, Sexy Dressing and the Eroticization of Domination

by Duncan Kennedy

[prospectivecritic]

“We are all insanely attractive right now actually, thank you, incredibly soft and awkward in our beauty. Everyone is gorgeous and no one is OK.”

[prospectivecritic]

https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/

[prospectivecritic]

Disaster anniversaries are powerful in part because they’re communal. The bomb went off in an instant. The tornado tore through town in an afternoon. The earthquake rocked the whole region at once. The pandemic, though, did not come to everyone on the same day, or even in the same month, and nor will its anniversary.

And then there are the smaller losses, the ones that did not threaten lives but still changed them. Today is the day I missed my mother’s funeral. The day I would have gone to prom. Met my grandson. Gotten married.

Some of us will mark no anniversary at all: the middle-school student who, having spent the past year in Zoom school, cannot name what exactly was lost or when but still feels its absence. Or the health-care worker for whom no day stands out in particular, because how can you pick a single one from the months of unremitting cataclysm? Their grief, for better and for worse, will be more amorphous.

[prospectivecritic]

Western classical music is not about culture. It’s about whiteness. It’s a combination of European traditions which serve the specious belief that whiteness has a culture—one that is superior to all others. Its main purpose is to be a cultural anchor for the myth of white supremacy. In that regard, people of color can never truly be pioneers of Western classical music. The best we can be are exotic guests: entertainment for the white audiences and an example of how Western classical music is more elite than the cultures of people of color.

[prospectivecritic]

“Slow TV [reality television of unedited reality, such as a more than seven-hour real-time video of a train ride from Bergen to Oslo] inspires a kind of awe at realness, the texture of experience itself; it’s a phenomenological exercise that heightens our perception. Ambient television, in contrast, aims to erase thought entirely, smoothing any disruptive texture or dissonance.”

Slow TV is high-definition in its visual information, yet it gets its meaning from viewers’ imaginative consciousness,” Nathan Heller wrote, in The New Yorker.

The ambience of ambient TV is often predicated on homogeneity; any diversity or discordance would disrupt the smooth, lulling surface. (“Emily in Paris” almost entirely stars white actors, too.) The lurking subtext of “Dream Home Makeover,” a kind of soft-white capitalist nationalism cloaked in throw pillows, brought to mind for me the architect Rem Koolhaas’s essay “The Generic City,” from 1995. In it, Koolhaas argues that globalization has caused a mass homogenization that leaves modern cities feeling like an airport, “a trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences.”

Using it feels like having your mind read, because all you do is watch or skip, focus or ignore, a decision made too fast to be fully conscious. Individual videos or accounts matter less than categories or memes; at the moment, my feed is mostly clips of skateboarding, cooking, and carpentry, not unlike the mundanity of the Netflix shows but also accelerated into media gavage. TikTok is an app for ambience.

It’s more atmosphere than content, the motion, the music, and the backdrop coalescing into a single moment of bittersweet freedom that loops over and over again.

[prospectivecritic]

Maybe you haven't noticed, but just about every scene in every blockbuster movie has the same color scheme.

[prospectivecritic]

A minimalist manifesto.

[prospectivecritic]

defined as work that’s “consciously created in a milieu that assumes the centrality of the network, and that often takes everything from the physical bits to the social ramifications of the internet as fodder.”