I Hope This Helps

When did body issues start? Perhaps the dawn of the printing press. I'm sure Johann Gutenberg had a notion of what his invention meant and what it would do. Mass-produced media. Mass-produced ideas. Mass-produced ideals . Mass production of anything has the potential to effect people's perspective. I wonder, as I do, if people who didn't match their mass produced ideals of their day felt self-conscience. Did Greek culture, with it's artistic preference for smaller genitals on men, cause men with bodies outside the ideal to feel inadequate? Surely. Perhaps less due to less saturation, since producing the fine art that constituted the mass media of the day took much more effort. Perhaps it was the Victorian era, however, where mass-produced forms of the both men and women came into their own. Not only were pictures of what men and women should look like printed (should look like according to god knows who, really), but products for reaching those physical ideals were adve...

The iphone is being advertised an awful lot. I don't own a cellphone because I don't like them. The iphone freaks me out. My stance on cell phones is this: you pay money so that you have no solitude. You're never alone when you have a cell phone, which I'm sure is a comfort to some but not to me, since I don't substitute comm-tech for actual human interaction. Cybernetics, as you can guess from previous posts, freak me out. The concept freaks me out. I'm not entirely comfortable relying on a car for transport, but I deal with it. The iphone, by design, appears to demand human manipulation to a greater extent than any other device of its kind. Now, I made a post before about the marketing of products and how most advertising's only real point is to make want things you don't need. As electronics become more and more personalized to their user, and these devices become more and more complex (the iphone knows how you are holding it) how long do you thi...

Mr. Brooks , while sometimes a messy convolution of plots and ideas, has a very interesting theme. Naturally, spoilers are ahead. The character Earl Brooks, portrayed by Kevin Costner, has an addiction: killing people. A destructive habit that is clearly parallel with alcoholism. In fact, Brooks attends AA meetings and confesses to being an "addict" rather than saying "Alcoholic." The habit itself is a phantasm that goes by Marshall, played with glee by William Hurt as a hallucinatory manifestation of Brooks's impulses and more or less his dialogue with himself. Brooks clearly derives a great of pleasure, perhaps even beyond sexual, from killing and Marshall only encourages him and reminds him of the rules that have prevented Brooks from being caught for years. This dynamic fascinates most during a key scene where, in a truly interesting twist, Brooks finds his daughter is suspected of murder. Brooks is visibly shaking after the police leave. Marshall asserts th...