#Di Carlee Gomes

[threadbareturnbacks]

"The current state of cultural and material decline plays an important role in the shift toward Puritanism in media and art, in consumer appetite, and in the political posture of the State. That is to say, with the compounding crises we are bombarded with (everything from climate disaster to rampant racialized police violence to genocide) as a part of our daily lives under late capitalism, the need for escape, and indeed, the need for that escape to be completely unchallenging and non-confrontational, has become imperative. Moreover, as control over our own material realities becomes less and less feasible, the last lone place we believe we can exercise agency is within the landscape of that which we consume. This has resulted in the consuming public approaching all media and art with a moral imperative — that which we consume must be perfectly virtuous, sanitized of all problematic or complicated ideas and depictions, because it has become the stand-in for our very realities, our very political action as citizens; consuming has become our praxis.

- The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire by Carlee Gomes, Nov 2023

[macksting]

ID: Excerpt from the linked article "The Puritanical Eye," with much of the text highlighted. Reads as follows: "The desire to exclusively engage with media and art made by [quote-unquote] unproblematic artists is a direct result of Americans viewing media consumption as an inherently political act because that is the supreme promise of Western prosperity and the religion of consumerism, and because it's seemingly all that's left. We've been stripped and socialized out of any real political energy and agency. Our ability to consume is the only thing remaining that's quote-unquote ours in late capitalism, and as a result it's become a stand-in for (or perhaps the sole defining quality of) every aspect of being alive today -- consuming is activism, it's love, it's thinking, it's sex, it's fill in the blank. [Highlighting lapses for half a sentence here.] When the act of consuming is all you have left and indeed the only thing society tells you is valuable and meaningful, [highlighted:] the act must necessarily be a moral one, [highlighting ends] which is why people send themselves down manic spirals deciding what, who is [quote-unquote] problematic or not, because for us the stakes are that high now. /end ID

passages that make you whisper "oh my god"

[viaxen]

things i read: week 03, 2024

articles! and blogs!!:

commuting with Shylock by Dara Horn

fetal attraction by Kerry Arquette

everyone is beautiful and nobody is horny by rs benedict

the puritanical eye by di carlee gomes

going postal by max read

Philip guston: forget the ku klux klan, this show is unmissable

Verhoeven, Virilio, and "Cinematic Derealization"

poems:

three poems by rose jeanou

the clown takes off his face

the delight song of tsoai talee

books:

tristam shandy by laurence sterne

the letters of philip dormer stanhope chesterfield to his son

middlemarch by george eliot

bleak house (again!) by charles dickens

narratology by mieke bal

too much shakespeare (sometime soon again i hope)

plays:

not too sure as im not in oxford this week, but am verging on going and seeing the cherry orchard (and probably bacchae next month!)