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Banning the corset and into the harem. Read my Body. “From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only practical consequence, we have to create ourselves as a work of art.” ( Michel Foucault ) A decree from fashion’s dictator Paul Poiret delivered women from one snare, [...]
What is Utopia and why does it attract both hope and skepticism in equal measure? In a way that appears meaningful, it is a productive inner tensions between two tendencies: a positive optimistic utopianism and a negative utopian pessimism. A confrontation between the secular and theological, with the negative tendency joining forces with the conception [...]
Its the Utopians versus the Dystopians, and at this juncture the latter have prevailed. Communities with European roots embraced the equalizing demands and freedoms of the New World’s open frontier, even as the new country claimed the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right. Though their inspirations varied—theocracy, millenialism, socialism, theosophism, behaviorism—they all reflected the [...]
Adoption Agency Worker: Mr. and Mrs. Rubble, this is your little boy. [Presents Bamm-Bamm] Betty Rubble: Oh Barney isn’t he precious? Fred Flintstone: Precious? They’d have been better off with the monkey. Wilma Flintstone: Fred! Betty Rubble: Does he have a name? Adoption Agency Worker: Bamm-Bamm. Barney Rubble: Is that short for something? Adoption Agency [...]
Caravaggio has become the ultimate old master superstar; his only real rival is Vermeer. It was a great if sadly short career. Caravaggio’s work was an expression of awareness of the precariousness of a reason that can at any moment be compromised, and definitively, by madness. Matthey, a Geneva physician very close to Rousseau’s influence, formulates the prospect for [...]
A cursed libretto is not your typical campfire ghost story.Its not a joking anecdote to be easily dismissed either. Its one helluva an imp who has displayed wildly inconsistent behavior over the years. The specific association of music and madness seemed to begin in romantic literature, and it has had ramifications for theories of aesthetics, [...]
… they only come out a night. Augmented reality has to be considered as part of the future of humankind. There are many ways for us to add data to our lives beyond the what is there physically.This could be called metadata. In Snow Crash, a piece of hard and speculative scienc fiction by Neal Stephenson, [...]
If you judged these things solely by press headlines, you would assume that the pope was about to face a lynch mob of jeering Protestants and vengeful atheists. Most Britons, we are told, are disgusted at the thought of spending a single pound on the visit, while various bigwigs from the arts and sciences have [...]
“Researching one of the seven deadly sins, gluttony, although food implies a consistent research into the bodily (taboos). To Nietzsche, largely responsible for rehabilitating the body in later humanistic thought, sinning is not a basic state of humanity, but merely an ethically religious interpretation of physiological indisposition. Foucault, following Nietzsche, thought that the body, poisoned [...]
” Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion throws many people for a loop the first time they see it. Its reputation as one of the great works of cinema leads them to expect an eye-popper like Citizen Kane, or a work such as The Bicycle Thief that distills to perfect transparency some aspect of human experience. Instead [...]
