November 27, 2023
‘Jockey Slut’ was a British music magazine that ran from 1993 to 2004, starting as a bi-monthly fanzine focused on dance music and club culture before becoming a monthly publication in 1999 following acquisition by Swinstead Publishing. The magazine distinguished itself through music-centered coverage that balanced witty fanzine-style writing with irreverent humor, giving early coverage to influential acts like The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, and The Streets, while also featuring rock and indie music. Its readers tended to refer to the magazine as just ‘The Slut.’
After transitioning to a quarterly format with increased online presence in 2004, the magazine closed in May of that year, leaving behind a legacy of being one of the first publications to feature interviews with many now-legendary electronic music artists.
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May 23, 2023
Vicarious embarrassment (also known as secondhand, empathetic, or third-party embarrassment and also as ‘Spanish shame’ or Fremdschämen in German) is the feeling of embarrassment from observing the embarrassing actions of another person.
Unlike general embarrassment, vicarious embarrassment is not caused by participating in an embarrassing event, but instead by witnessing (verbally and/or visually) another person experience an embarrassing event. These emotions can be perceived as pro-social, and some say they can be seen as motives for following socially and culturally acceptable behavior. Vicarious embarrassment is often seen as an opposite to schadenfreude, which is the feeling of pleasure or satisfaction at misfortune, humiliation or embarrassment of another person.
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January 2, 2023
Tobias Schneebaum (1922 – 2005) was an American artist, anthropologist, and AIDS activist. He is best known for his experiences living and traveling among the Harakmbut people of Peru, and the Asmat people of Papua, Indonesia.
Schneebaum was born into a family of Jewish emigres from Poland in New York City. Schneebaum’s father Jacob (known as Yankle) emigrated to America from Poland just before World War I, in which he served in order to get U.S. citizenship. His mother, Riftcha, emigrated in 1913. He was born as Toivele Schneebaum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and grew up in Brooklyn. A school official later changed this to Theodore Schneebaum, by which he was known by friends and family throughout his childhood. (He later changed his name legally to Tobias.)
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January 1, 2023
In theater, dance, and live musical performances, a rider is a set of requests or demands that a performer sets as criteria for performance, which are typically fulfilled by the hosting venue. Some rider requirements are attempts to avoid specific problems from previous shows. Some venues cut corners to save expense, leaving the touring crew with inedible food, etc. ‘Unreasonable requests’ (if legal) can be contractual obligations. Failure to meet such terms can compel performance fees to be paid without a performance.
Riders typically include hospitality and technical sections. Since the 2010s, inclusion riders, which provide for certain levels of diversity in casting and production staff, are used in the film and television industry.
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August 16, 2022
A Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) is a stock character type in films. Film critic Nathan Rabin, who coined the term after observing Kirsten Dunst’s character in ‘Elizabethtown’ (2005), said that the MPDG ‘exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.’
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, like some other stock characters such as the Magical Negro, seems to exist only to provide spiritual or mystical help to the protagonist. The MPDG has no discernible inner life. Instead, her central purpose is to provide the protagonist with important life lessons.
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June 12, 2022
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection built on the Ethereum blockchain. The collection features profile pictures of cartoon apes that are procedurally generated by an algorithm.
The parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club is Yuga Labs. The project launched in April 2021. Owners of a Bored Ape NFT are granted access to a private online club, exclusive in-person events, and intellectual property rights for the image.
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March 27, 2022
Hyperpop is a loosely-defined music movement and microgenre, characterized by a maximalist or exaggerated take on popular music. Artists tagged with the label typically integrate pop and avant-garde sensibilities, drawing on tropes from electronic, hip hop, and dance music.
The microgenre reflects an exaggerated, eclectic, and self-referential approach to pop music and typically employs elements such as brash synth melodies, Auto-Tuned ‘earworm’ vocals, and excessive compression and distortion, as well as surrealist or nostalgic references to 2000s Internet culture and the Web 2.0 era.
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January 11, 2022
‘The High and the Mighty‘ is a 1954 American aviation disaster film, directed by William A. Wellman, and written by Ernest K. Gann, who also wrote the 1953 novel on which his screenplay was based. John Wayne stars as a veteran airline first officer, Dan Roman, whose airliner has a catastrophic engine failure while crossing the Pacific Ocean.
The film was produced nearly two decades before ‘Airport’ and its sequels (along with the ‘Airplane!’ parodies, the first of which featured Robert Stack lampooning himself). The ‘High and the Mighty’ served as a template for later disaster-themed films such as the ‘Airport’ series (1970–79), ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ (1972), ‘The Towering Inferno’ (1974), ‘The Hindenburg’ (1975), and ‘Titanic’ (1997).
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August 22, 2021
The Green Knight is a character from Arthurian literature. He is a formidable judge and tester of knights, and as such the other characters consider him as friendly but terrifying and somewhat mysterious.
In ‘Sir Gawain, the Green Knight,’ a 14th century alliterative poem by an anonymous poet, he is so called because his skin and clothes are green. The meaning of his greenness has puzzled scholars since the discovery of the poem, who identify him variously as the ‘Green Man,’ a vegetation being of medieval art; a recollection of a figure from Celtic mythology; a pagan Christian symbol — the personified Devil.
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August 20, 2021
The avant-garde (French: ‘advance guard’ or ‘vanguard’) are people or works that are experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society. It is frequently characterized by aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability.
The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement, and still continue to do so, tracing their history from Dada through the Situationists and to postmodern artists such as the Language poets of the 1980s.
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August 2, 2021
CowParade is an international public art exhibit where fiberglass sculptures of cows are decorated by local artists and distributed in public places. After the exhibition in a city, which may last many months, the statues are auctioned off and the proceeds donated to charity.
They often feature artwork and designs specific to local culture, as well as city life and other relevant themes. There are a few variations of shape, but the three most common shapes of cow were created by Pascal Knapp, a Swiss-born sculptor who was commissioned to create the cows specifically for the CowParade. He owns the copyrights to the standing, lying, and grazing cow shapes used.
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August 1, 2021
Grand Poobah is a satirical term derived from the name of the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Mikado’ (1885). In this comic opera, Pooh-Bah holds numerous exalted offices, including ‘First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral … Archbishop … Lord Mayor’ and ‘Lord High Everything Else.’
The name has come to be used as a mocking title for someone self-important or locally high-ranking and who either exhibits an inflated self-regard or who has limited authority while taking impressive titles. American writer William Safire wrote that ‘everyone assumes [the name] Pooh-Bah merely comes from [W. S. Gilbert] combining the two negative exclamations Pooh! plus Bah!, typical put-downs from a typical bureaucrat.’
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