The inner blogosphere of Black Balloon has been abuzz with fake authorial gushiness versus real teen gushiness versus the gush-worthiness of David Foster Wallace faking out teens for real. And this past week, when a package of my old books arrived from my mom, complete with my own teen copy of Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, all three confluenced in a cosmic and darkly underscored conclusion.
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Where do the weird words of our world fall within the approval matrix of today’s writers? Do words like “lunule” (the ivory crescent of a fingernail tip) and “gynecomastia” (man boobs) poeticize or demystify the peculiarities of everyday life? In short, is obscure vocab savvy an in or an out?
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Kayla's lovely touchy-feely post about our current squeamishness when it comes to internet feelings got me thinking about how just the opposite's en vogue over in the Tumblr World of TeenGirldom. So I put together a list of text/image-confessional sites and had a good think about why they arouse my inner Humbert Humbert.
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Marina Abramovic's nude, cannibalistic conception of this year's LA MOCA fundraising gala got me thinking about the most deliciously absurd gala digestibles of recent history. Feast on this...
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Skwerl, an Australian short film in which gibberish mimics how English might sound to non-English speakers, recently wound up on Gawker and New York Magazine. The film is unremarkable subject-wise: a sort of mumblecore prose poem about an alt-attractive couple and a romantic dinner gone sour. So why did I find myself playing and...
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Beyoncé's video for "Countdown" has got me wondering: when did eye spasms, epileptic winks, vertiginous whatever-rolls and hummingbird blinks become the new voguing? Are hyphy eyes the next big thing?
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This summer saw the widespread US release of World on a Wire, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s long-lost, made-for-TV epic about artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Time to reflect.
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So comparing the phenomena of love to the quantum physics of our cosmos is pretty hackneyed. But over at io9 there is a kaleidomindscope of an introduction to the quantum universe's latest potential matter—spin liquids—that perhaps changes all that.
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