That’s a good question, my young friend, because enjoying John Mayer is not something a ‘real’ man is willing to broadcast.
Continue readingArchive for the Pretensions toward cultural theory Category
‘What’s Your Favourite John Mayer Song?’
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory with tags Cormac McCarthy, guitar, Harrisen Hughes, John Mayer, Marty Friedman, Ophelia, Siamese fighting fish, Slayer, Slow Dancing in a Burning Room, The Crossing on October 23, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
Mirror Mirror
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory, trauma with tags body building, body image, Charles Bukowski, diet, Exercise, Fitness First, gyms, Ham on Rye, Instagram, Mirror Mirror, plastic surgery, social media, Sylvia Plath, Todd Sampson, Training on September 19, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
‘I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.’
‘Mirror’
By Sylvia Plath.
Todd Sampson is full of shit.
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Ex Machina
Posted in Film, Pretensions toward cultural theory with tags Alex Garland, Bluebeard, Ex Machina, Jackson Pollock, Kyoko, Robert Oppenheimer, Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex on August 26, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
2.
Bluebeard is the grisly tale of a powerful, wealthy nobleman who marries a young, innocent peasant girl. She discovers, while he is away, that her new husband has beheaded his previous wives once they have ceased to amuse him. In part, it is a cautionary tale about a rich, powerful man’s objectification of a young, naive woman.
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Ex Machina
Posted in Film, Pretensions toward cultural theory with tags Blade Runner, Netflix, Parasite, Stan, Turing Test on August 24, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
I tend to peruse my Netflix and Stan accounts with dismay. Firstly, they clash with the portrait I paint of myself socially, as someone who ‘doesn’t watch television.’ Secondly, I find that I’ll open an account with a streaming service because I want to see something specific, like Parasite, for example, and then I’m confounded by the volume of crap I don’t want to see that comes with it.
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The Neon Demon
Posted in Film, Pretensions toward cultural theory with tags Aleister Crowley, Bret Easton Ellis, Drive, Los Angeles, Nicolas Winding Refn, Peter Bradshaw, Sergei Eisenstein, The Guardian, The Neon Demon on June 14, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
“Evil floats, weightlessly across the landscape of Los Angeles in Nicolas Winding Refn’s new film, The Neon Demon, co-scripted with TV writer Mary Laws and British dramatist Polly Stenham. It is a reverie of such sheer satanic rapture that Refn could be on danger of taking Bret Easton Elis’ crown as the Aleister Crowley of the 21st century.”
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A Promising Young Woman
Posted in Film, Pretensions toward cultural theory, violence against women with tags A Promising Young Woman, Alex Garland, Carey Mulligan, Dredd, Genre cinema, I Spit on Your Grave, Judge Dredd, Rape, Rape/Revenge, Variety on May 18, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
I was fairly horrified by the film ‘A Promising Young Woman’, especially the murder at the end.
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Flannery O’Connor Hates You
Posted in Observation, Pretensions toward cultural theory with tags Dante, Flannery O'Connor, Franz Kafka, Huberty Selby Junior, Inferno, The Ramones, Virgil on March 20, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
I’d never read Flannery O’Connor until lockdown. I’d seen her listed as one of the outstanding writers of the twentieth century, specifically in terms of her short stories. I had time on my hands, so I bought her collected works.
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Happy 60th Birthday, Henry Rollins
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory, Real Men, resistance training with tags Asylum, Cronos, Judith Herman, King Lear, Morbid Angel, Rollins Band, Slayer, The End of Silence, The Palace St Kilda, Trauma and Recovery on February 28, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
The first disturbing event of first-year university was the day I went to meet a childhood friend of mine when he was discharged from the insane asylum.
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Why I Don’t Believe in the Patriarchy (But Still Consider Myself a Feminist)
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory with tags Clementine Ford, Eurydice Dixon, feminist, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Berger, Laura Mulvey, Lisa Wilkinson, Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, The Project, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Ways of Seeing, Women Don't Owe You Pretty on February 19, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
2.
When Lisa Wilkinson explained on ‘The Project’ television program that Eurydice Dixon was murdered by a man who was the pointy end of a patriarchal culture which is driven to murder women as it sexualises them, I was outraged.
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Why I Don’t Believe in the Patriarchy (But Still Consider Myself A Feminist).
Posted in Pretensions toward cultural theory with tags Easter Bunny, Feminism, patriarchy, Santa Claus, Satan, sexual assault, Simone De Beauvoir, The Beauty Myth, The Female Eunuch, The Second Sex on February 16, 2021 by Jarrod Boyle
1.
The patriarchy is like Satan, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Sure, there’s some kind of cause and effect involved, but the figure itself is bought into being by those wanting to explain more subtle and complex phenomena, but are happy to settle for an easy answer with a face on it.
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Theme Park at its Darkest 