Hip hop can deal with emotions sort of but it’s not a strength. Nas’s song about dancing with his dead mother made me cry but that is neither here nor there. Moms make me cry in general. Whatever. It’s an exception. Hip hop is style and virtuosity. Bach’s counterpoint produces linearity by complicating the relations […]
Films tend to lean left because they put a face on the human condition, and thus make it harder for those who feel that the disenfranchised and those who are different should be left out in the cold. It’s an emotional medium, which wants us to understand a character and situation that may or may […]
Lucky for us, popular culture does not need to be affirmed or denied. It’s happening, and you and I, as members of the populace, are in it. This is not to say that there are not all sorts of ways to bargain with our position, en masse or otherwise. But this is to say that […]
Conscientious inhabitants of art-spaces – makers, collectors, readers, and so on – respond to an intersection between expressive position and functional affect. This is a fancy way of saying that we care about the other people involved in artistic processes. But since, according to our common senses, it’s not what you say but how you […]
by Alec Horowitz Four Stars If there is a word to describe Monsieur Lazhar that word is compassion. That’s certainly what the teacher has for his students throughout this picture. This isn’t just a story about a good teacher. It’s a story about a good man as well, who is dealing with his own grief […]
by Tom Bair I I’ve decided to read the bible cover to cover, not because I am any more or less a Christian than I was at the start of the year, but because sections of this book have been read and reread for over two thousand years by three world religions, and If I […]
by Brian Trimboli We’re brought up on stories and the overall meaning they convey to teach facts alongside moral values. But what if that knowledge is only surface deep to begin with? What if we, as writers, often think of the page as two dimensional, and forget the fundamental sounds of our voices toward saying […]
by Frannie M. There is a reason we write. There are many reasons. We write to persuade, to entertain, to move, to communicate, and to deceive. When we pick up a pen we have an intention, fully formed or not. There is no writing without voice, without intent, or purpose. Because voice is, I posit, […]
