Brook Wilensky-Lanford shares her thoughts on the closing MoMa exhibit “Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974.”
Posts Tagged ‘popular culture’
July 20th, 2011
The rise and fall of Christian rock
posted by Charles GelmanMeghan O’Gieblyn, writing for Guernica, forays into the history of CCM, or Christian contemporary music, which also happens to be that of her own adolescence, tracing the gradual displacement of the more overtly gospel elements of Christian pop, rock, and rap, as the Christian music industry, in its growing drive for “relevance,” felt the squeeze of secular music, especially under the pincers the more profitable and marketing-savvy MTV. More than the fate of explicitly Christian popular music, this course, O’Gieblyn suggests, reflects the simultaneous devolution of a distinctly evangelical way of being in the world, which, stuck as it is between oppositional self-cloistering and secularizing dissipation, seems to O’Gieblyn to have tended toward to the latter.
July 20th, 2011
Cults video throwsback to Jim Jones
posted by Amanda KaplanIndie band Cults has released the official video for “Go Outside,” which brings the fascinating and tragic story of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown back into the public field of view.
June 24th, 2011
Is there anybody out there? (Pink Floyd and Charles Taylor)
posted by Charles GelmanIn the Frankfurter Rundschau, Hartmut Rosa hears the echoes of Pink Floyd in the work of Charles Taylor.
June 1st, 2011
Beyond denial
posted by Justin Neuman
For a brief moment in 2007, news of a hit Iranian television series, whose Farsi title was translated variously as Zero Degree Turn or Zero Point Orbit, proliferated across the print and digital mediascapes of the Anglophone world. The series, created by Iranian director Hassan Fathi at great expense and broadcast in a thirty-episode season on the flagship state television station IRIB1, revolves around a Romeo and Juliet plot of illicit romance, with a distinctive twist: while the proverbial Romeo is one Habib Parsa (played by Iranian hearthrob Shahab Hosseini), a Muslim Iranian pursuing his studies in France, his Juliet is none other than a Jewish classmate, Sarah Astrok (played by the French actress Nathalie Matti), with whom he falls in love.
May 25th, 2011
After Oprah
posted by Jessica PolebaumOn the occassion of the final broadcast of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Kathryn Lofton reflects, in an On Faith article, on what Oprah was.
May 6th, 2011
O is for Ozarks
posted by John Schmalzbauer
O is for Oprah. O is for Ozarks. Can the second embrace the first? Though Lofton stays away from the issue of audience reactions, it is an intriguing question. Dubbed an “Evangelical Epicenter” by the Patchwork Nation project, my Ozarks county is a long way from Oprah’s Chicago studio.
April 28th, 2011
Divine pervasion and the change that isn’t
posted by Pamela KlassenPervasive presence—or just ordinary ubiquity—is one of the main strategies in Oprah’s attempt to serve as a guide through the jumble of consumer choices, spiritual makeovers, and “original individuality” that is “secular” living in contemporary North America. Reading The Gospel of an Icon gave me a heightened awareness of this ubiquity, a new recognition of the way in which Oprah really is everywhere. As Lofton puts it in one of her clarifying turns of phrase: “She is the divine pervasion.”
March 30th, 2011
Adrift on common dreams
posted by Jason BivinsWhat a strange, provocative experience it has been to dwell with Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon during these unsettling months. The seams of public life seem especially frayed of late—a precariousness underscored by disasters natural and political that keep coming. And yet ours is the radiant moment of endless possibility so central to Lofton’s subject, whose chief promise is that of a self that matters, that experiences abundance and becoming. It was with this coexistence in mind that I plunged into Oprah’s world.
March 15th, 2011
Spirituality: what remains?
posted by Webb KeaneTo use the concept of spirituality analytically is enormously difficult. There comes a point in reading this book when one can’t help wondering what would not count as spiritual? But, of course, that all-encompassing capacity is an important part of the popular appeal of this category in the first place. In a helpful moment of specificity, Lofton reports that Oprah is opposed to religion, which is identified with “exclusive rituals, legislating hierarchies, codes of membership.” Spirituality, by contrast, would presumably be what remains once these impediments have been removed. It is not created or bestowed, but uncovered. In this respect, spirituality is the product of that purification characteristic of what I have called the “moral narrative of modernity.”
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