Word: sontag
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...famed, unambiguously-titled collection of essays “On Photography,” the celebrated American writer Susan Sontag notes that “the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”Upon visiting artist-curator Tim Barber’s online art gallery tinyvices.com, a mixed-media motley of art and artistically-inclined product, one might feel inclined to agree with Sontag. Perhaps because Barber himself is a gifted photographer, the site is photo-heavy and characterized by the now-standard downtown...
...Susan Sontag were alive today, she would probably be hard at work on an essay. The essay would be called "Notes on Quirk," and it would be about Juno, Feist, Marisha Pessl, Napoleon Dynamite, Charlie Kaufman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Bridget Jones, Nick Hornby and roughly 71% of all bloggers. The essay would analyze--lovingly, pitilessly--that category of entertainment that celebrates people who are lonely, misunderstood and defiantly eccentric but who, we're supposed to understand, are secretly cooler than everybody else, if only they knew it. Sontag would locate the elusive line that separates Bad Quirk--annoying, self-satisfied idiosyncrasy...
...Susan Sontag described horror and science fiction as "the imagination of disaster." The innovation is in thinking the unthinkable, not creating rounded or even plausible characters. In fact, human idiocy is a crucial aspect of a genre that trades in mortal threat. If the characters holed themselves away in some safe place, they'd never meet the monster. They have to be at risk in order to escape, or get trampled, and for us to get a cheap but essential movie thrill...
...celebrity pics, with their industrial-strength charm, are back--the naked and pregnant Demi Moore, Brad Pitt languishing on an orange bedspread--but there are informal family shots as well, like one of her brother and father, below, and many pictures of her longtime beloved, the writer Susan Sontag, even as the ailing Sontag ventures toward death. Leibovitz's unflinching final portrait of her, laid out just after she died, is unforgettable...
...Greeks imagined a king who killed his father and married his mother, and Shakespeare could hardly write a tragedy without a regicide angle. It's also been a running storyline on 24. Opera, melodrama, horror movies - all create worst-case scenarios, whose extremes teach home truths. Susan Sontag called science fiction "the imagination of disaster." The same goes for a genre that seeks the most lurid explanation for historical events. Call it poli...