She shills, but it’s an embodied shill. That, to me, is what the term “influencer” really connotes. It’s affective labor to the nth degree.

A little Memphis goes a long way, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun when used thoughtfully. Also, Nathalie du Pasqier, for one, is a genuinely wonderful artist, so the more of her work the merrier, I say.

A fruiting body, you say? Looks like a regular herb to me!

It’s bad, but the li’l Spiderman hanging back to catch the falling chocolate bars is an absolute ace.

*cancels appointment with the Jackson Pollock of nephrology*

Ah, yes, Picasso, who is most famous for strictly adhering to the standards of conventional beauty, a very good artist to be nicknamed after when you are in the business of splicing bits of face together for purely aesthetic purposes! Sign me up!

Ha ha ha! I hadn’t seen those Amazon reviews, and I’m absolutely cracking up at how many cat avatars are on there. Amazon Vine’s algorithm was just like, “Oh, you like cats! Here is a cat book.” I wonder if they sent My Dog Tulip to all the dog lovers, too, my god.

Good grief, New Directions has been absolutely knocking it out of the park, and I’m sort of losing my mind trying to keep up. Just in the past month or so they’ve given us extremely great things from Krasznahorkai, Serre, Drndic, the above mentioned Oyamad and Jaeggy, and next month a Hrabal memoir about cats! It’s…

I had a friend who didn’t take animation or puppetry seriously, but one viewing of Švankmajer’s Faust changed all that!

I’m heartened that this new Dark Crystal iteration was a good experience, but I’m a little bummed at the assumption that puppetry is otherwise not to be taken seriously as long-form entertainment. It’s a 4,000-year-old art form, with cultures all over the globe having developed their own unique traditions of it, some…

Eh, long films that are truly well made, like long novels, can enter viewers into places and experiences that shorter films cannot. Duration can be a very effective tool. Looking outside of Hollywood, especially, there are any number of great examples:

Um, the EYES are I’s, okay?!?! It’s homophonic and it’s WRONG.

Belloc’s The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts is also pretty wonderful. It’s all very much in the lineage of Struwwelpeter, Max and Moritz, and so on.

I know this is the very least of it, but also feeling entitled to appropriate the title of the riot girl empowerment anthem, which is now a standard in Girls Rock camps everywhere, is really fucking rich, too. I mean, it absolutely cannot be a coincidence this song shares the title of Bikini Kill’s most famous song,…

I dunno, I think I’d be irritated with that, honestly. It’s technically true, of course, but as a defense it’s a bit of a cop out. The “unreliable narrator” is a literary device that serves a narrative function, but it doesn’t do that here. What’s important is that it provides an explanation as to why [spoilers ahead,…

Nah, McConnell doesn’t just wait things out when he sees an opportunity to undermine and attack. He’ll poison pill this to hell, then blame his Democratic colleagues for not working with Republicans on the bill. That’s what “bipartisan discussions” means in Mitch’s world. Violently cynical power plays is what he gets…