Our Secret Life in the Movies – Michael McGriff & J.M. Tyree
Films call up memories, and they also shape them, give them a lattice to grow on; viewing and memory, like lattice and vine, are interwoven. Everyone has a secret life in the movies.
The People’s Platform – Astra Taylor
When Twitter was banned in Turkey, a popular image showed the Twitter bird’s beak sewn shut, a striking visual conflation of free expression and free enterprise.
T.R. Fehrenbach’s spellbinding semi-fictionalizations of Texas history have an air of Manifest Destiny about them, Texas envisioned as a promised land for an exceptional people.
I love that — the thing that is so intense and painful that you have to live a life glancing sidelong at it, and are surprised when you are, once again, somehow, in the midst of it, wondering how it is that you led yourself there.
A Fisher King in the White House
Reagan-as-void is a necessary first step in the project of understanding what precisely occurred in the White House during the eighties.
We Built This City: DETROPIA and CRUEL OPTIMISM
Detropia registers a mood of attenuated uncertainty, the precarious present understood not as a single melodramatic catastrophe but as “a thick moment of ongoingness.”
Notes on the Firebombing of the Freedom Press Bookshop
What happened on Friday was not a regime officer tossing copies of Marx one by one into a bonfire in a public square, but it was nonetheless a book burning, an attempt to intimidate a movement or stifle an ideology by destroying its literature.
Amber, Archers, Cinnamon, Horses and Birds
In remembrance of Jack Gilbert.
I like to work with this kind of cluster of references that mirror each other.
In vintage Kraus (and feminist) style, there is no possible separation of love and sex from politics and philosophy.