Archives for Year: 2016
Treating Your In-Home Automated Concierge Like A Real Person (Brittany Scantland-Lall)
For Christmas, my parents gave us an Amazon Echo. If you’ve seen the commercials (or have one in your home), you know this is the Amazon in-home concierge with “Alexa” who responds directly to your commands. “Alexa, add yogurt to my grocery list.” “Alexa, play Piano Guys Christmas music.” “Alexa,…
Neoliberal Dreams And The Plight Of The Humanities, Part 2 (Carl Raschke)
The following is the second of a two-part series. The first installment can be found here. A longer version is published in .PDF version in an upcoming issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Seaborg was correct in one key respect. The humanities historically had never really belonged…
Neoliberal Dreams And The Plight Of The Humanities (Carl Raschke)
The following is the first of a two-part series. A longer version is published in .PDF version in an upcoming issue of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Neoliberalism, The “Knowledge Society”, and the Birth of Biopolitics The results of the Presidential election of 2016 struck the academic thought-world…
Celebrities Becoming New Focus Of Religious Worship For “Non-Believing Believers” (Madison Tarleton)
Each day millions of Instagram savants wake up and take their morning coffee with the Kardashians, spend their lunch break painstakingly assessing the Angelina Jolie divorce, and settle in for a pleasant dinner at home with Beyoncé and her family. All of this is to say, once we make the decision…
Baz’s Bronx – Get Down Or Let Down? (Lachlan MacDowall)
On August 12 Netflix screened the latest project by Australian film director Baz Luhrmann. The Get Down is a twelve-part television series set in the Bronx in the 1970s that chronicles the birth of disco, punk and particularly hip-hop, through the lives of four teenagers. In one sense, the broad story of hip-hop…
Beyond “Zombie Formalism” – Painting After The End Of Painting (Iwo Zmyślony)
This essay first appeared in the catalogue of the 9th Bielska Jesień curatorial exhibition (28.10-26.12.2016), held by Bielska Gallery BWA (Curators Jagna Domża and Wojciech Kozłowski, https://www.facebook.com/events/1643325709292819/). Reprinted with permission. Rather than initiating the death of painting, as was expected, photography and other media of mechanical reproduction have been like…
Slam Poetry Returns Literature To The People (Interview)
This interview with slam poets Lane Shuler and Jonathan “Courageous” Clark along with commentary and some history of the genre was undertaken by Esthesis editor Rebekah Gordon. Slam poetry is a competitive form of spoken word that began in the U.S. in the 1980’s in open mic sessions at cafés in cities…
Professional Dress Codes Lack “Authenticity” For Millennial Generation (Rebekah Gordon)
I worked at a bank for a year and a half between the completion of my undergraduate degree and the beginning of my master’s. Our dress code, which by many standards was relatively lenient, included multiple strictures. For example: Whether or not you regularly meet the public, you are required to…
From Shakespeare To Search Engines – Experimental Poetry Comes Of Age (Daniel Y. Harris)
The following are edited portions of an interview with Daniel Y. Harris, a contributing editor of Esthesis as well as co-founder and current editor of X-Peri, an e-magazine for experimental poetry. He is also the author of several influential books of poetry, including Hyperlinks of Anxiety, The Underworld of…
Schopenhauer And Coltrane – The Metaphysics Of Atheism Illumines “A Love Supreme” (Jon Avery)
Arthur Schopenhauer, a nineteenth century German philosopher, praised music as the highest art form because it gives us immediate access to the inner life of human existence and the reality behind appearances. To grasp the “reality behind appearances” is very similar to the goal of much of Hindu and Buddhist…