Author: sImenSIasMS

In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki is a lovely little meditation on traditional Japanese aesthetics and how it differs from Western aesthetics. It was not, as I had hoped, about a mood I’ve been interested in for some time, mono no aware, my favorite translation of which is “beauty as an awareness of the transience of…

Why art? Because you have something to say, or because it allows you to live a more interesting life? Do the two coincide? Does good art come from having something to say, or from the compulsion to do certain things which happen to result in art? One would think that art which is not the…

It used to be that I’d post a summary of links I’d been reading and thoughts too short to be their own posts every Sunday. I kept it up for a while, too, but it was more work than I’d thought. I won’t make excuses, only acknowledge the fact.                 This…

There’s a genre of photography popularized by Ryan McGinley that consists of quirkily beautiful young people who somehow are always wearing the right flannel shirts and frolicking naked through the woods or lighting fireworks and getting drunk and high on rooftops in the sunset, or otherwise showing off their bohemian or faux-hemian lifestyle, always impeccably…

In a fit of inspiration, and/or insanity, I conceived of this thing I want to write which is essentially an extended riff on archetypes, and so I’m busy devouring archetypal stories. And I realized something: 4chan is Loki, Pan, and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Which is to say, the 4chan hivemind, well-known cesspool of…