10 things that Camille Paglia has said that I disagree with 1. She tends to brush too swiftly over the obstacles posed by structural inequalities, especially when it comes to race. She highlights cultural influence that blacks have had in the US, but insists that the racism has dramatically diminished and is largely a thing of the past, and relies too heavily on a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality. Further, she insists that within her broadview of world... Read more
“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” -Oscar Wilde Scrolling through my feeds is confirming for me how much unironic polemical discourse (posturing as sincere, righteous, or virtuous) has been rendered empty by our bourgeois technocratic neoliberal paradigm. Nuance is dead. Cognitive dissonance is now (and has always been) America’s national beverage, pastime, and anthem (this statement doesn’t make sense, but neither does America). The only substantial means of discourse today is metaironic, self-deprecatory, oblique... Read more
Dionysus (or Bacchus, in the Latin rendering) is the Greek god of wine, drunkenness, fertility, insanity, religious ecstasy, festivity, and theater. In his The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes the tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian ideals in art, religion, and culture. He refers, of course, to Dionysus, who represents pleasure, the uncontrollable, unpredictable chaos of nature, and femininity, and his counterpart, Apollo, who represents man-made structure, discipline, order, and masculinity. Camille Paglia, building on Nietzsche’s dichotomy, asserts that Western... Read more
Recently a group of friends recounted to me a scene at a party involving an argument over who got dibs on the aux cord. “I keep trying to tell hispanic girls that they have to mix up the Spanish music…you can’t play two songs in Spanish in a row,” proclaimed one girl, who wanted to play more hip hop songs in English. “If you’re going to play more than one song in Spanish in a row, at least put on... Read more
Quentin Crisp, the British aesthete, came to fame in the 1940s for being one of very few publicly vocal flamboyant gay men. In a manner similar to De Sade, Crisp understood his own homosexuality not as a morally neutral mode of self expression. Instead it was a means to subvert both cultural norms and the design of nature. Crisp was constantly in search of a “Great Dark Man”: a mythical figure that homosexual men grasp at who embodies everything “they... Read more
Ever since The Weeknd rose to fame in the early 2010’s, commercial R&B music has taken a turn away from the soulful. The Weeknd’s dark and whiny vocals come from a position of disillusionment and detachment, rather than heartfelt passion. It is a nihilistic longing full of despair rather than a hopeful longing…which demonstrates the distancing from R&B’s roots: Gospel and Negro Spirituals, which gave voice to faith in the promise of a benevolent deity who provides for those who... Read more
“Safaera,” Bad Bunny ft. Jowell y Randy and Nengo Flow The intro to Bad Bunny’s “Safaera” is a sonic amalgam trudging from out of the chthonian…the dark, swamp-like underworld. It speaks to the unpredictable Dionysian elements of human nature–what paganism celebrates, and what monotheism subjugates to the design of Natural Law and integrates into the pursuit of unity with the Creator. Jowell y Randy groan out lyrics, as if dragging their bodies through an orgiastic swamp of bodies, where it’s... Read more
Exercising at a gym is the supreme expression of the atomized neoliberal self. In pre-modern cultures, conditioning the body was tied to virtuous ends that transcended the self, whether for the sake of discipline, or honoring the dignity of the body as gift, or strengthening the body for the sake of service to others. Further, the experience of exercising was tied to the real—to activities that were already integrated into one’s daily life (i.e. farming, building, childcare, walking) or was... Read more
Spotify Wrapped represents the atomization of the consumption of art and its subjection to the ideals of neoliberal identitarianism. Music used to be a form of existential exploration and truth-seeking, serving as a unitive force amongst peoples and societies. This was more apparent when music could only be heard when played live, usually in a communal setting. Even recorded music had a communal element in the beginning, whether it was by purchasing music in a store alongside other listeners, or... Read more
5 most fun articles to write this year: 1. Me explaining why before you criticize either the Pope or stereotypical trads about the TLM, you should consider how it draws people who feel outcasted from the Novus Ordo (regular) Mass. Do you think everyone at Latin Mass is an Ideologue? You might be wrong 2. Me explaining how mental illness is not an obstacle to being used by God, and how secularism obscures the spiritual proclivities of neurodivergent people. Were... Read more
Cracks in Postmodernity
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