About a year ago I bought a gadget that uses wireless technology to play electronic files and Internet radio through my stereo. Not a mind-bending idea. Receivers and transmitters have been around for over a […]
Art - Culture - Technology
Posted on:
Porn: It’s Never Been So Pornographic
Porn has quickly adapted to an explosively facilitated Internet market by not only fragmenting into numerous subgenres that cater to particular fetishes, but by purging itself of what its audience doesn’t want, which is whatever […]
Consumerism - Culture - Politics - Technology
Posted on:
The Cell People
A woman reading a book raises a gaze of exasperated woe. Next to her is a dude whose one-sided babble runs something like this: “Nah, ain’ fuckin’ that bitch no mo’…Crazy-ass bitch be fuckin’ Shafon, […]
Culture - Labor - Politics
Posted on:
Temporary Life 2: Revenge of the Human Resource
For three years I remained a temp or, should I say, impermanent. To those for whom I worked I was as insignificant as the tasks they assigned. And when those tasks were done, I was […]
Class - Consumerism - Culture - Politics
Posted on:
Liberty: Tied, Beaten and Blown
Awhile ago I was flipping through the New Yorker and saw an interesting cartoon: two men in uniform, guns trained on a pedestrian, behind them a van with “Fashion Security” on the side. The caption […]
Class - Culture - Politics
Posted on:
Class War? Not Yet
On the October 14, 2005 Diane Rehm Show “Friday News Roundup,” David Corn of The Nation complained that the Administration’s policy to rebuild New Orleans as a tourist town would permanently exclude many of the […]
Culture - Labor - Politics
Posted on:
Temporary Life 1: The Lying Debutant
During the recession of the late ’80s and early ’90s, big businesses were suffocating in their own fat, bloated from non-performance-related capital the Reagan Administration had funneled from public coffers in the form of deregulation, […]
Academia - Culture - Literature - Poetry
Posted on:
High-tech Poetry Bitch
They had big dictums, deep erudition and cunning linguistics. Marianne Moore translated La Fontaine’s easygoing French into an English of conspicuous difficulty. In Pound’s hands the rudimentary Italian of the troubadours and bare-bones Chinese of […]
Culture - Politics
Posted on:
Indignant or Asinine?
It is the inalienable right of the individual to publicly demonstrate a feeling. No authority can prohibit it, no civil institution can enforce it. It’s simply a right we all have and exercise as a […]
Consumerism - Culture - Politics
Posted on:
Self-Reliance: An Exorbitant Delusion
If anything in this essay reflects badly on Empirican white-collar culture, I do not absolve myself of hypocrisy. On the contrary, I admit that I have practically benefited from that culture and, rightly or wrongly, […]