Category: Aesthetics
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Surrealism: The Logic of Dreams
Few movements in 20th-century art captured the imagination as forcefully, or as lastingly, as Surrealism. Emerging in the 1920s from the embers of Dada and the disillusionment of World War I, Surrealism sought not only to revolutionize art but to liberate human consciousness itself. It was not a style, but an attitude — a way…
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Chapter 2: Welcome To My World
We’ve started hanging out after school, the boy and I, on the down-low. Apparently, we’re at the age where boys and girls become a danger to each other, according to society. But at my house, we can see each other semi-secretly as much as we like. No one needs to know, apart from his parents…
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The Silent Era: Cinema Before Words
Before the world spoke in sync with film, it dreamed in silence. The silent movie era — stretching from the late 1890s through the late 1920s — was a time when cinema evolved from novelty to art form, from flickering short reels in nickelodeons to sprawling epics projected in ornate picture palaces. It was an…
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Chapter 1: My Little Friend
It’s the first day at my new school and I am bursting with excitement.Due to the sudden rush to find me a place, Grandpa George’s Girl Friday, who is actually an old and highly efficient lady called Bonnie, has enrolled me in a local state school in Memphis, not the sort of place I’m accustomed…
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Life Magazine: America in Pictures
For much of the twentieth century, Life magazine was not just a publication — it was a window through which Americans saw the world, and the world saw America. From 1936, when publisher Henry Luce reimagined the title as a weekly news magazine told primarily through photographs, until its decline as a mass-market force in…
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Federico Fellini: The Dream Architect of Cinema
Cinema has produced few visionaries who transformed the medium so thoroughly that their very names became adjectives. Federico Fellini is one of them. “Felliniesque” has entered the lexicon to describe a sensibility that is at once surreal, carnivalesque, erotic, grotesque, and tender — a world where memory and dream coexist, and where the line between…
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The Human Condition According to Valerie Solanas
By Bergotte Valerie Solanas is the writer this series was not supposed to include. She is not canonical. She is not comfortable. She wrote one major text, the SCUM Manifesto, which calls for the elimination of men, and she shot Andy Warhol in 1968, and she died alone in a welfare hotel in San Francisco…
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James Dean: The Rebel Who Remains
Few figures in 20th-century culture occupy the same space as James Dean: a young man whose career lasted scarcely three films, yet whose image endures as shorthand for rebellion, beauty, and the tragedy of lost potential. He lived only twenty-four years, died in a Porsche Spyder on a California highway in 1955, and yet nearly…
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Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre: Whimsy, Power, and the Feminist Legacy of a Children’s Classic – Part II
When Shelley Duvall launched Faerie Tale Theatre in 1982, few could have predicted its cultural afterlife. The anthology series — running for six seasons, with 27 episodes aired until 1987 — brought classic fairy tales to life with an ensemble of Hollywood royalty. Robin Williams, Mick Jagger, Susan Sarandon, Jeff Bridges, Liza Minnelli, Vanessa Redgrave,…
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The Geometry of Roughness
How Benoit Mandelbrot’s outsider mathematics turned the broken, the jagged, and the cracked into a theory of the world A bug on a line printer The image, when it first appeared in the spring of 1980, looked like an accident. A staff researcher at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York,…
