Secular Historiclasm, Moral Contagion, and Cults of Emotional Sacrifice (2020)

Artwork comes to be judged on associational values relating to the worst attributes of a country, artist, or political moment (or, conversely, how much it adheres to progressive identistic trends), and not its contextual and/or numinous values. It is one thing to say that all artwork is political; it is quite another to say that it is all ultimately political.

The Denied Silences of Modernity (2019)

Dance music began as a liberationist kind of music which could induce in people Dionysian frenzies. Now it’s what you blast at 6am while at the gym before a breathless ten-hour workday.

Mundane Cathedrals of Civilization (2021)

For decades now, following the standardization of television sets in people’s homes, we have lived in a world where a screen, and one’s appearance on it, has been the metric by which an individual was legitimized. This is one of those modern paradoxes: only through artifice can “reality” occur. Today, the computer screen and the endless material of the internet has mostly supplanted the television screen, yet a screen it remains.

Why “Waifu”? (2021)

The very thought of attempting to dissect the term waifu can feel overwhelming. The term is a mimetic manifestation of casual misogyny and ethnic infantilization and also one which has been embraced even by people who are very keen on distinguishing themselves from “weeaboo” incels.

The Age of the Class Clown (2021)

It is true that the Internet is not the equivalent to in-person social functions (even as we collectively have come to often treat it as equal to or greater than what is usually termed real life); but how often would we tolerate, in our presence, a person who self-inserts near the start of every conversation and brings it all to a halt and then around to theirself with a wisecrack?

What is “Wholesomeness”? (2021)

To be truly wholesome is to be (w)holistic. If the saccharine latter-day meaning of “wholesome” reduces a larger, integrative idea to an ankle-deep caricature built of styrofoam-like platitudes (it is no mere coincidence that many wholesome memes utilize cartoon characters), so too do Horny (the erotic, excretory, orificial) and Edgy (the violent, enraged, depressed).

What is Radical Music in 2021? (2021)

…radical music today will, and must be, folk music. Our common idea of folkiness might be the scrappy singer strumming a guitar, but my interpretive reference rather has to do with the idea of a music being written, first of all, for one’s self, and then shared with a small-scale community, which in turn helps the artist grow at their own pace.

Architectural Criticism in 2021 || Part 1.5: A Response to a Critique of Betsy DeVos’ Mansion

…if architecture is, as a craft, critically whittled down to nothing more or less than inorganic expressions of social disparities, with every aesthetic decision a reflection of politically explicable taste, then we must assume that a great deal of the world’s most remarkable architecture is equally ridiculous and despicable, since so much of it was born out of great privilege and required specialized resources.

Why Care About UFOs? (2021)

Last year, I began reacquainting myself with interests which once had intensely excited my imagination and had afterwards been pushed so far aside that it was as if they’d never been. Two of these were cryptids and UFOs.

Architectural Criticism in 2021 || Part 1 (2021)

One of the special and primary challenges to architectural criticism is that it is addressing something with public and private, artistic and functional, attributes. The degree to which these attributes may be formulated varies, but their dualities are ever-present. What can often arise is a kind of criticism which is expressing a scopophilic relationship between author and subject wherein one fails to appreciate a bigger, public, and more interactive picture.

Femboy Hooters as Consumerist Ephebic Sexuality (2021)

When examining the “joke” of Femboy Hooters, one must first realize that it is really not much of a joke at all. If there is a joke, it’s that the very idea — a restaurant chain staffed by boys ostensibly only recognizable as such for their flat chests and pants-bulges — can only ever be an idea.

Stop Hitting Yourself: A Brief Examination of the “Karen” Meme (2021)

It is often the case with a meme that what is new is not the idea, but the visuals, the signifiers, by which that idea is expressed. The Karen meme fits into the phenomenon of inventions made in order to anger the creator, with the secondary intent of sharing this invention so that a kind of collective irritation occurs.