a Northern California rural idyll

18Dec16

My sister recently scanned a treasure trove of old family photos. I’m usually resistant to nostalgia, but these shots from our childhood in rural Petaluma were just too good to pass up. The initial pair of shots obviously date from Halloween past. I love that my sister felt the need to wear a mask as […]

Filed under: daily life, fashion, music, personal, sweet story of Trout Monroe   |  4 Comments
Tags: Art to Wear, childhood, country living, hybridity, Luther Burbank, music, Northern California, nostalgia, piano, rural idyll, textile arts, weaving

honeyland and alienation — a cartoon rhapsody

18Nov09

Múm’s video for Rhubarbidoo (off Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, their latest album) is one of the most re-enchanting videos that I’ve seen for a long time.  If, as Max Weber has argued, Enlightenment rationalization, especially as it manifests itself in the bureaucratized capitalism of Western society, results in a disenchanted world where we […]

Filed under: animation, art, cinema, culture, film, history, music, nature, philosophy, society, technology, video   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Adorno, alienated labor, alienation, American farming, animation, Aya Yamasaki Brown, bee society, Beholden, capitalism, cartoons, childhood, consumerism, creation, creative destruction, Dialectic of Enlightenment, disenchantment, Disney, Enlightenment, Enlightenment thought, exploration, Fantastic Planet, fantasy, Flowers and Trees, Gulliver's Travels, hive as factory, homo ludens, Honeyland, Horkheimer, imagination, industrial militarism, industrialism, industrialization of American Farming, Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, invention, iron cage, Jason Malcolm Brown, Lilliputians, Max Weber, Múm, montage, natural world, nature, play, re-enchantment, Rhubarbidoo, Rockwell, science fiction, social control, social unconscious, They Made Frogs Smoke 'til They Exploded, totalizing systems of control