Category: Uncategorized

Post-Truth President / Post-Truth World: Trump and Life in the Upside Down
The heel is the antagonist who breaks the rules, cheats, sabotages, and nastily takes advantage of his opponents outside the ring. In lucha libre wrestling, heels (rudo) are brawlers fighting with brute forces, often dressing up like devils or tricksters. Trump wears the same suite and tie every day, like portraying this character he invented. And he gets his crowd to boo, hiss, cheer and jeer, to chant “build the wall!” or “lock her up!” and carries on about “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary,” he turns his political opponents into wrestling characters, and brings what might have been reasoned debate to the level of vulgar theater. His opponents were caught flat footed while he stirred the nationalist id. They either never understood what was going on or were not prepared to meet him on the mat.

(Un)Techsplaining the Body
Something struck me when seeing the new commercials for the Apple watch, you know, the ones promoting the device as an exercise monitoring, vitals taking, step counting and personal motivating all-in-one super device. Much like […]

Fearless Girl and the False Prophets of Wall Street
Given this context, Fearless Girl has an even more insidious, surreal quality. It’s like when Mercedes Benz appropriated Che Guevara at an auto show to promote their new cars as revolutionary. Or like when the Washington DC Martin Luther King Memorial is unveiled as a white statue. This is a function of capitalism as a political ideology, however, to absorb all dissent, to obfuscate criticism, sanitize history and flatten social space with a halo of social and political amnesia.

Who’s to Satirize the Corporate Satirizer?
Kendell Jenner is said to have been “traumatized” by the backlash she’s gotten on social media for her much maligned Pepsi Commercial, made by a professional Super Bowl ad man. It was widely seen to be insensitive to the […]

Between Two Walls
The Two Walls from Fragile Dignity on Vimeo. *** Between Two Walls It seems a bit of an awkward promise to make the public: to build a wall. It’s a rather retro thing if you […]

Uhura at the Back of the Enterprise: Star Trekism and the Backlash Against Post-Racial Utopianism
Folklore in human history was really an oral tradition, some of it making its way into poetry and literature. In our time, our folklore comes basically from popular culture, but it still serves the cultural […]