Year: 2023

The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 4 – Cultural Ground Zero

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Cultural Ground Zero If you aren’t familiar with the concept of cultural ground zero (a term I owe to authors JD Cowan and Brian Niemeier), it is the idea that the major entertainment industries reached a zenith, and after this, quality began to decrease, and all trends lost their forward momentum. The exact year is 1997, in case you were wondering, though the video game industry continued to progress for another ten years on the back of new technology and industry growth, reaching its own ground zero in 2007. For most media, 1997 was the last year consumers could reasonably…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 3

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Popular Art “Popular culture” as a term is nearly a tautology; it follows that if we share a common culture, the elements that make up that shared culture are popular. In use, “pop culture” refers to the art that, in the free market, gains ascendency to the point where knowledge of it becomes part of the common culture. This idea only has meaning in contrast to other origins of culture—constructs such as “high culture,” “fine art,” “literary fiction,” and my favorite tautology, “art music.” These later ideas are defined primarily by not being popular culture and, therefore, in an unfortunate…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 2

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Hyperdrive Media The model which defines the corporate period could not function without two important factors. First, the model requires the ability to legally collectivize resources and use them as if they belonged to a single person. This is the concept of the corporation, with “corporate” meaning body, as in the company acts like a person and can own property like a person without being “a” person. The other critical ingredient is mass media, which allows the distribution of a media product to large numbers of people while maintaining a low cost to the end consumer. The technological revolutions of…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 1

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The origins of corporate art If you’ve ever taken an art history or music history course, or surveys of architecture or literature, it’s likely you have seen various styles and trends in the arts cordoned off into various “periods” beginning and ending at certain dates. For instance in music the Classical period is generally said to begin in 1750 (the death of Bach and the end of the Baroque) and end in the early 19th century, about 1820, at which time the Romantic period begins. Today, I’d like to introduce a recently ended artistic period: The Corporate Period. But before…

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On the Water of Awakening and Odysseys

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In 2017, I published my first straight fantasy book, The Water of Awakening. Some people loved it; some hated it. Either opinion is fine because I made the book exactly the way I wanted to make it. For 2017 (or 2023, as I write this) it’s something outside of the typical modern approach to fantasy. I wanted to do something really different from what I saw repeated in the same overlong fantasy books from the prior 20 years. I wanted to avoid a romance B-story, a subplot I had become exceedingly bored with (though I used one in my next…

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The importance of good gear

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This is a post regarding musical equipment, but it could easily apply to any artistic or creative domain. Despite my already over-full guitar arsenal, I got another one recently (a gift for my 40th birthday, technically): the legendary Parker Fly. This one is a “pre-refined” version from 1997, and it’s really something special. It’s probably the best electric guitar I own now, and that’s saying something since my standards are very high and I own a lot of guitars. It brought back to my mind a topic that’s worth talking about, which I mention in my book Keys to Prolific…

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Socializing Weight Loss

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The idea of a shot to lose weight is making waves this week, and for some very good reasons. This is a very disruptive idea in the current ideological battle over fatness and fitness. To quote the FDA: Wegovy works by mimicking a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) that targets areas of the brain that regulate appetite and food intake. The medication dose must be increased gradually over 16 to 20 weeks to 2.4 mg once weekly to reduce gastrointestinal side effects. Semaglutide (the actual name of the hormone) ends up acting as an apatite suppressant. This is nothing new;…

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The Weird and the Horrible

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Despite being called the father of horror, very few modern authors imitate H.P. Lovecraft. When they do, they tend to steal elements of his “world-building,” that is, they use the Cthulu Mythos or other elements of the stories and write in a totally different style from Lovecraft. This tends to miss what makes Lovecraft’s work compelling; it’s not the mythos itself, but how it is revealed that makes such an impact. Lovecraft is really Weird Fiction, not so much “Horror,” which as a literary genre solidified itself later in the 20th century. The feelings evoked are not merely fear, but…

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Syncretism

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Those who study ancient history might be familiar with “Syncretism,” which the Romans practiced, where foreign gods are linked with the home culture’s gods and viewed as similar expressions of the same deity or various aspects of the many gods and spirits that governed the world. For the Romans, this was a practical exercise. The key to Rome’s success (to the Romans) was piety and maintaining the Pax Deorum, or “Peace of the Gods.” Having the favor of the gods, along with the ancestors (who gave the Romans the Mos Maiorum, or “way of the ancestors”), gave the armies victory…

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MIllennial Masculinity

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One of the stranger things about online culture to arise from Internet 2.0, or the internet after the hegemony of social media, is the rise of various “masculinity” circles and gurus. Some important influencers, including Mike Cernovich and Jordan Peterson, have built their initial followings speaking about “masculinity” to an audience of primarily Gen X to Millennial men. This phenomenon is a bit of an oddity, historically, since the essays and talks tend to revolve not around philosophical and spiritual questions about the nature of man and his energies, but of what masculinity means on a personal, actionable level. That…

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