Author: Douglas McLennan

Fight Back: One Lit Magazine Editor Explains A Boycott Of Simon And Schuster

For Simon & Schuster, publishing controversial nationalists can be immensely profitable. “During Milo Yiannopoulos’s tenure at Breitbart – where he’s told gay people to ‘get back in the closet‘ and women to ‘log off‘ the internet – he has amassed more than 1 million followers on Facebook. Threshold Editions, the Simon & Schuster imprint dedicated to ‘innovative ideas of contemporary conservatism’, has a hit on its hands.”

40 Years After Peggy Guggenheim’s Death Legal Battles Still Rage Over Her Amazing Collection

The legal briefs have become increasingly acrimonious. The foundation says that it has faithfully carried out Peggy’s wishes, that she never said the collection should remain as she left it, and it describes the descendants’ claims as “distortions,” “pointless,” “ridiculous and outrageous,” and “devoid of good faith.” It also says that a 2013 letter to the foundation from the descendants’ attorney “leaves little room for doubt as to their genuine objectives: they believe they can obtain a financial settlement” from the foundation.

A Revolution Is Coming. Say Goodbye To The Jobs (Uh Oh)

“Fifty percent of the jobs will be gone in ~20 years. Not from the great sucking sound of jobs to Mexico that can be stopped with a wall. Not from moving offshore to China. From automation that is moving quickly from blue collar manufacturing to white collar information work. Second only to climate change, this is the greatest disruption of our time, and I don’t mean that word in a good way.”

So How Did A White Nationalist Land A Major Book Contract? Here’s A Window On The Publishing Business

“The fact that someone with extreme views considered offensive by many people got such a significant book advance shows how the publishing world reflects, and plays to, many of the divides in our culture. Few left-leaning readers realize that within mainstream publishing, conservative books are a booming business.”

How John Cage-The-Person Informed The Art

“Throughout his life, Cage remained a cultural omnivore. Interwoven into Selected Letters are comments that reveal how his life and art were informed by his study of the I Ching and Zen Buddhism, his burgeoning interest in mushrooms (making him an amateur mycologist), and his embrace of a macrobiotic diet. He aspired to have “all distinctions between art and life removed.” His blending of Eastern and Western artistic traditions placed him at the center of the American avant-garde of the 1950s and ’60s.”

Sure Criticism Tells You Whether to Pay Attention. But Once It Was So Much More…

The death of critic John Berger, who is best known for his four-part BBC series called “Ways of Seeing,” has prompted a number of reflections on what it means to be a critic, what makes a great critic, and whether or not the current age values such criticism. Berger wrote often about being skeptical about perceptions of art and hardened wisdom about what it meant. He suggested a way of looking at art that was fresh and personal and questioned the generic.

Today, criticism is often seen as old-fashioned – why rely on some old fart at a newspaper to tell you what’s what when you can bloody well make up your own mind? We usually have immediate access to the music, films, art and books under discussion, so we can just see for ourselves. This is a reasonable position; why peruse a dozen 150-word album reviews if you’re just looking for something new to listen to? Spotify can do that for you. In a world where culture is merely entertainment, criticism has no function.

It’s tempting to think that criticism has been reduced to a Consumer Reports function that gets straight to the point about whether or not the art in question is worth engaging with or not. But

we have to believe that people – ordinary people, sitting at home at night – are interested in nuanced, complex and even difficult art. Only through that will we find someone like Berger, who might help us learn how to look at it.

Judge Rules Against Fan Version Of “Star Trek”

The movie project billed itself as a professional quality fan “Star Trek” project. “To the purpose and character of the use, the judge writes that Axanar attempts to “stay faithful” to the Star Trek canon with nary any criticism, seemingly shrugging off defendants’ arguments of staging a ‘mockumentary.’ To the nature of the copyrighted work, the judge writes that after 13 Star Trek motion pictures and six television series, these types of works “are given broad copyright protections.”

The Music Audience Is Now So Fragmented There’s Virtually No Crossover

“One size stopped fitting all long ago, but now there are clearly two broad groups of music audiences which must be addressed in entirely different ways, across different channels and with different tactics. At the most base level this is a case of youth versus grey, of digital native versus digital immigrant, of playlist versus album, of sales versus consumption. But it is also more complex and nuanced than that. There are overlaps and cross pollination. They may be relatively thin on the ground right now, but like some long-lost treasure map, they may point to how bridges can be built across these two worlds.”