full fathom five thy father lies

The Moving Pixels Podcast Spends Halloween with The Music Machine

I suppose with Halloween coming up and all that, I should mention the Moving Pixels podcast from Monday concerning an indie horror game, The Music Machine. Personally, I wasn't totally wild about the game, but as always, there are some interesting things to talk about regardless.

I'm kind of more fascinated by just the conception of a horror game made "Solo Deo Gloria" (that is, "for the glory of God alone"). David Szymanski is not the only artist that I'm aware of that has made similar claims about the motivating force behind their work (the poet Dylan Thomas, for example, immediately comes to mind). I've just never heard anyone who worked dominantly in the horror genre claim that motive for creativity. It's interesting.

Of course, anything unusual tends to interest me. My wife always says that if I met a redhead that was missing an eye and had a peg leg, that I would immediately run off with her.

The Moving Pixels Podcast Spends Halloween with The Music Machine

Returning to Isaac's Body: The Metastasis of the Monstrous

This is sort of like an "adaptation" of an older article I wrote about bodily transformation and The Binding of Isaac. The first time was pure textual explanation. This time, I try to demonstrate what I mean through pictures.

Returning to Isaac's Body: The Metastasis of the Monstrous

Playboy and the End of Nudity

I mentioned that I wasn't entirely done with the topic, as I wanted to discuss Playboy's relationship to the history of the nude in art.

So, this is the expanded version of my discussion of the end of the nude in Playboy magazine.

Playboy and the End of Nudity

Never mind the bullocks, here's your syllabus

I occasionally come across (or someone points out) that one of my PopMatters essays or something that I have written for a journal appears on someone's syllabus at another college or university. I always think: that's cool, some of my personal madness has driven some discussion somewhere, or something like that.

However, never have I been prouder than being the lead essay on a syllabus for a course entitled, "Punk Style and the Anarchy of Meaning," a course taught at the University of Denver (a few miles away from one of my alma maters). I would totally take that class, but even better, my essay, "Trolling the Player: Punk Aesthetics and the 'Anti-Fun' of Suda 51's Games" appears in a section called, "Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's Your Syllabus."

Tremendous. Seriously, even if the time was spent saying that what I had to say was total bullshit, I just love to be present in some way in a course on punk.

I should teach one someday, too. I'll have to think about that.

Johnny Rotten, Bad Brains, X, and Gertrude Stein? Ideas, ideas, ideas...

The scholar

A thousand years ago, it would have been a monk's, a militant fanatic who would have turned his uncompromising back on the world with actual joy and gone to a desert and passed the rest of his days and nights calmly and without an instant's self-doubt battling, not to save humanity about which he would have cared nothing, for whose suffering he would have had nothing but contempt, but with his own fierce and unappeasable natural appetites.