Since 1998, part of my excitement over the World Cup has been stoked by ads leading up to it. Usually, Nike makes charming and witty ads, like this one, in which the Brazilian national team messes around at the airport, having just been told that their flight to Paris is delayed:
What Eric Cantona is doing [...]
Continue reading about The cringe-inducing South African World Cup ads have begun
I have been posting of late, just not here. I’ve put up three posts over at Lithchat discussing the Eurovision Song Contest, in particular the song chosen by the Lithuanian people to represent them at the contest, the subversive “Eastern European Funk.”
The first post merely introduces the song with a few video clips thrown in.
The [...]
Continue reading about Eurovision and neoliberalism: the case of InCulto
I finally saw The Hurt Locker, after wanting to see it forever. I don’t remember what about the original reviews or trailers made me think I’d like it, but the absolute orgy of praise it has received in the months since release only built up the interest.
And now, I don’t get it. I think the [...]
Even though in my last post I tried to describe the movement towards “doing scholarship in public” that forms a background for three different levels of academic fights these days, it still seems sometimes like the “humanities is a waste of time” fight remains the most salient.
After all, if one takes that waste of time [...]
Continue reading about Cultural neuroscience to the rescue of us lost humanists?
This is, I imagine, the much shorter version of a post I have had simmering in my head for a few weeks now–or, well, actually, many of the issues dovetail with another post that’s been around since new years. But somehow I haven’t sat down to figure out my point rigorously yet, and so I [...]
Continue reading about Making this worth it by going to the streets
There’s a frustrating article by Tim Parks up on the NYRBlog now about the the dull new global novel. I’ll save the breezy history of the novel Parks provides (making an economic and democratic case for moving to the vernacular from Latin) and furnish his closing two paragraphs, which turn the whine into vermouth:
If culture-specific [...]
Continue reading about Should one mourn national literature(s)?
Is Up in the Air (or, as it is called in France, In the Air) a complicated movie? Or is it simply a sloppy one? Bryan called the movie too long, but then he also called it depressing. But I felt uplifted at the end, largely since I was very excited to finally see a [...]
Holy smokes was I not surprised by the decision this week by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC. I was always suspicious of the argument that “money is not speech, it’s property,” though I repeated it several times. I agree with Bryan, in that I can’t really imagine that a pesky little thing [...]
Continue reading about America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws
When Free came out in 1993, “The Gun and Bible” was instantly my favorite track. It’s a funny and absurd song, funny and absurd in the way that genocide is funny and absurd, that manages, by twisting and repeating one bizarre sample (discounting the coda about drinking and shooting), to efface the cold objectivity of [...]
Continue reading about The Gun and the Bible carved this nation
My love of The Wire connects pretty well with my interest in David Harvey, who taught at Hopkins for a long time and treated Baltimore as an immense site for empirical geographical work. I also suspect that the show’s taking place in Baltimore is part of Walter Benn Michael’s fascination with it, which he’s polished [...]
