The Cult In Culture

Why Is Opera So Derided in America?
Culture/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Music/Performing Arts

Why Is Opera So Derided in America?

By
 / 21 June 2016
Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel offers everything movie goers seek: debauchery, religious obsession, exorcisms, devilish abuses, graphic sexual assault, and a variety of horrific effects both musical and visual.
Let’s Play at Kentucky Fried Chicken, America
Culture/Featured: Top of Home Page/Politics

Let’s Play at Kentucky Fried Chicken, America

By
 / 7 April 2016
In this game we consumers are reduced to plastic playthings, happy to be fingered. This and other thoughts on American culture.
Celestial Sound: Thoughts on Mahler’s Third Symphony
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Celestial Sound: Thoughts on Mahler’s Third Symphony

By
 / 19 January 2016
To listen to Mahler is to claim your soul hasn’t been splintered by postmodernity -- even if you hate Mahler and disbelieve in the soul.
Cacophonies and Heavenly Choruses: A Cure for the Classical Blues
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Cacophonies and Heavenly Choruses: A Cure for the Classical Blues

By
 / 3 September 2015
Is there any term in any field that is more slippery or meaningless or that carries such impossible, historically artificial burdens of meaning as "Classical Music"?
Searching for Value in All the Wrong Places, Or How to Put Away Childish Things
Culture/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Media/PopMatters Picks

Searching for Value in All the Wrong Places, Or How to Put Away Childish Things

By
 / 5 March 2015
More than fetishizing his prizes, the collector fetishizes his own obsessiveness and glorious blindness to the machinations of what non-collectors call “real life”.
Werner Herzog’s Films Ask, What More Is Mankind Than Nature’s Parasite?
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Werner Herzog’s Films Ask, What More Is Mankind Than Nature’s Parasite?

By
 / 14 October 2014

For Werner Herzog, mankind’s tug-of-war with nature is not a present imbalance but a lost cause, the barbarous beauty of nature made mere barbarism by humankind.

The Gunman on the Unemployment Line: Masculinity, Professionalism, and Ethical Bankruptcy
Culture/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Film/PopMatters Picks

The Gunman on the Unemployment Line: Masculinity, Professionalism, and Ethical Bankruptcy

By
 / 28 August 2014
Surely even Dirty Harry needs a break from cinematic violence, some time off at Walden Pond. Though I doubt its tranquility would deter him from picking off the sparrows.
The Virtues of Faithlessness: Dario Argento’s Dracula 3-D and the Crutch of Tradition
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The Virtues of Faithlessness: Dario Argento’s Dracula 3-D and the Crutch of Tradition

By
 / 1 April 2014
What can it mean for Dario Argento, auteur extraordinaire, to forsake his unique melding of fearless style and fearless silliness and instead submit to Bram Stoker?
Culture/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Film

Against Cult Cinema: Documentarian Didacticism and ‘The Animals Film’

By
 / 11 October 2013
Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Film

Between the Omnivore and the Hermit: Reducing Religion to a Cult of One

By
 / 21 July 2013