Yesterday, my boyfriend and I went to see two one-bedroom apartments in our price range, one in Crown Heights and one in Bed-Stuy, both cramped and in mild disrepair. The light plywood doors were flimsy. The bedrooms were monkishly small. The sink in the Bed-Stuy apartment overshot the sink-crevice in the bathroom [...]

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Unless you live under a pretty literal rock (and I’m not judging if you do), that song should sound familiar to you. There’s a little shock of contrast when you first figure out what it is that makes you giggle, but after that, I think, the shock is that the performance makes so much [...]

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When I was a sophomore in college, I used to have arguments with my Humanities 220 professor about affect. The class was a year-long interdisciplinary survey of Modernism, and we, its students, used to joke that it existed to give us a thorough enough greatest-hits grounding to participate in cocktail-party conversations of its topic: [...]

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Maybe the reason I didn’t fall head-over-heels for the current, Patrick Stewart-helmed Macbeth is that it’s not my favorite Shakespeare, just as a play—I find it a little long, a little slow; I tend to mix up the tertiary characters; I have trouble with the way the two major elements (1. The darkness-of-the-human-soul introspective stuff, [...]

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Ick.
Aside from the fact that the project described above sounds pretty gross, I have a problem with art that intends to “provoke discussion” without actually having anything to say. If this project does have anything to say, its creator does not seem to know what it is:
The goal in creating the art [...]

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Aunt Sally sat next to me at Macbeth last night. I know her name is Aunt Sally because she told me a story about her niece. “I have a niece who’s gay; I love her dearly; she always says, ‘Aunt Sally, you have to be up to date on this sort of information.’” [...]

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I first read this article way back when it actually came out, but I return to it periodically because there’s something so weird about it.
I also have a thing about Harold Bloom. I got sidetracked into a substantial discussion of his peculiar aesthetic neurosis in the introduction to my undergraduate thesis, because [...]

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Okay, I’m going to earn my “semiotics of the mundane” badge right off the bat, because I don’t think it gets much more mundane than a close reading of a comment on a blog post about focaccia, sardines, and Williams-Sonoma.
Food, I think, is one of the biggest battlegrounds for our collective aesthetics right now (see: [...]

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Part of the problem with beginning is that beginning implies its own necessity. Before the sounding of the barbaric yawp, there is the opening foolishly wide of the mouth, the inflation of the egotistic chest, and, I picture, the raising of the feeble, punctuative index finger. There is the place between intake of breath and [...]

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