CultureHack

The Narcotic Blessing of Forgetfulness

2009-02-17T15:28:18-05:00

Though Beatrice doesn’t live at the end of the world, this is beginning to seem a technicality. Because so far it feels like you’re driving through an early Springsteen album: leather, denim and baseball caps inside too many tricked-out cars. And the endless succession of skinny kids hanging around on every corner, like that one, with his upended bike, kneeling next to the ratcheting gears. The town exudes a civic pride in being a kind of Wayne’s World simulation, and this guarantees the wink you’ve been waiting for is never going to come: each one of these chop tops is aspirational instead of a John Waters reference, and you’ll need to think hard about that tonight, with scotch and a long journal entry . . . .

A Unified Theory of Me

2008-12-01T15:14:55-05:00

Through the interleaved coding ju-ju of RSS, HTML, Javascript and CSS, I'm dynamically dropping into CultureHack the five most recent items from my Twitter and Posterous manifestations. See the daily Twitter content (dubbed Observations) as CultureHack Haiku-ed, and the less-frequent, more complex Posterous material (christened Tangents) as CultureHack At-Large

The Nature of Nature

2008-11-19T11:22:35-05:00

With the exception of Turner, my appreciation of painted landscapes is entirely technical; minus my fascination with brushstrokes, composition and light, Monet haystacks would die in their amped-up attempts to Make Us Notice The Literal And Spiritual Benefits Of Rural Life In A Way That We Would Otherwise Entirely Miss (And So Thank You, Claude). I remain unmoved by landscapes in the same way I patiently wait for Springsteen songs about The Myriad Aspects of Blue-Collar Life That We Would Otherwise Entirely Miss (And So Thank You, Bruce) to finally end. In each instance, the very obvious has been made epically intense. And, because of the narrowing affect of the obviousness, it’s also about mind-numbing redundancy.

She Blind-Sided Me With Search Strings

2008-11-17T14:04:48-05:00

The massive cognitive dissonance of linking Palin (a) to knowledge of, well, any kind, and (b) to inherently divergent opinions is best conveyed by this simple thought experiment: Imagine Fred Flintstone and Dino as mascots for Cincinnati University's School of Paleontology. Like Gloria Foster said The Matrix, 'it bakes your noodle . . .'