Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
I’m no maestra of the avant-garde, and consequently, my interest here is in offering neither definitions nor death knells. To mourn the loss of the avant-garde — or to seek the shock of transgressive aesthetics in increasingly arcane crannies — is an evergreen endeavor. As Roland Barthes wrote, “être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir ce qui est…
Movie studios favoring familiarity and profitability over artistry is nothing new or particularly innovative. At the moment, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are on strike against Hollywood’s profit-driven and margin-squeezing madness, throwing the craven greed of the executive class into even sharper…
Yikes, y’all. I don’t even smoke and I feel like I need a cigarette before I get this thing started. We’re here to talk about Hogwarts Legacy, and to do that we need to discuss the whole mess. Pull up a chair, pour yourself some tea, wrap yourself in a blanket, scream into a pillow…
What happens when fans of Joss Whedon grow up and start working in television and movies? Netflix’s remake of Cowboy Bebop. I can’t say for sure if the writers and showrunners on Bebop were, like I once was, huge fans of Buffy or Angel, the two shows that put Whedon on the map….
3, 2, 1, let’s watch something else. Author byline /Author byline Share Tools /Share Tools screenshot It’s easy to understand why Netflix felt it might be able to pull off a live-action “Cowboy Bebop,” just as it’s easy to understand why it all went so horribly, horribly wrong. On the one hand, Shinichirō Watanabe’s epochal…
The Post-Dirtbag Left For years, “Chapo Trap House” and other podcasts have paired anti-capitalist ideas with the rhetorical style of social media. Is a new form emerging? July 26, 2021 Two shows harness a progressive energy, but they differ sharply in affect.Illustration by Miguel Porlan On the evening of January 6th, while National Guard troops were…
A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users…
data-module-name=”article.app/lib/module/wsj/breadcrumbs” The sports website Deadspin lost all of its editorial staff this week in an exodus that complicates its new owner’s effort to turn around the former Gawker Media properties acquired a little over six months ago. The new parent company, G/O Media Inc., which comprises about a dozen sites including Gizmodo and the Onion,…
TV ReviewsAll of our TV reviews in one convenient place. Crank Yankers feels much older, culturally speaking, than it actually is: The prank call puppet show originally ran on Comedy Central from 2002 to 2005, but even then it seemed pulled by the gravity of old comedic modes like stock characters and catch phrases….
TV ReviewsAll of our TV reviews in one convenient place. Congratulations to Netflix: After over seven years of commissioning original series, it finally got around to creating its own Law & Order. This isn’t intended as a slam on its new international production, Criminal, but rather a compliment. The long-running NBC procedural didn’t run…