They’ll always lose the culture wars: The right loves fighting lost causes– but liberals keep winning

www.salon.com|Stephen Prothero

Since the 1990s, the culture wars have repeatedly been left for dead. Just months after political commentator Pat Buchanan declared a “cultural war” at the 1992 Republican National Convention, neoconservative Irving Kristol remarked, “I regret to inform Pat Buchanan that those wars are over and the left has won.” In 1997, New York Times reporter Janny Scott observed that the term “culture wars” had become as anachronistic as a “leisure suit.” “Not long ago, one could hardly get through a week without stumbling across somebody or other’s culture war—outraged fundamentalists or neoconservatives or righteous multiculturalists raving about Hollywood or political correctness or Robert Mapplethorpe or Allan Bloom,” she wrote.

Everything is terrible: How to watch “The Big Short,” “Making a Murderer” and “Concussion” without losing your mind

www.salon.com|Lauren Duca

Pop culture is drenched in bureaucratic corruption right now. Between “Making a Murderer,” “Concussion” and “The Big Short,” we have three portraits of flawed institutions, seemingly lacking in a clear villain. None point to a single figure responsible for the unethical nonsense on display. Instead, in each distinct yet eerily similar story, it’s clear that unquestioning cooperation is required for corruption to prosper. It takes a village to induce depravity.

Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari: We’re not buying their books — but we’re paying for them in other ways

www.salon.com|Scott Timberg

Celebrity memoirs seem to be failing to hit as hard as they’re expected to.According to The Wrap:

Celebrity-penned nonfiction books have typically served as mutually beneficial partnerships between publishers stars [sic] looking to extend their brands — but if the top selling books of 2015 are any indication, that relationship may be on the rocks.

Annual lists released by sites like Amazon and Barnes and Noble of last year’s 100 best-selling books did not include buzzy titles by Lena Dunham, Aziz Ansari, Patti Smith, Mary-Louise Parker or Leah Remini’s account of escaping Scientology.

On the surface, this is bad news: It’s always sad when publishers don’t generate the revenue they’re hoping for. Twenty-first century changes, between the move to digital and the fading of the once-robust middle class, have hit all the creative “industries” (sorry, terrible term); publishers have held up better than music, photography, and journalism, and a lot of us would like to keep it that way.

Obama’s State of the Union optimism: “The difference between Reagan and Obama is that Reagan believed it in his bones”

www.salon.com|Scott Timberg

Given the fraught state of the nation, and the intensity of partisanship, President Obama’s final State of the Union speech seemed oddly lit with optimism. Presidents like to conclude their terms with a sense of completion, of having made progress and restored the nation, but given the sense of anxiety across the country, his point of view may not be widely shared even among people who like him. Or maybe a president needs to be optimistic and lines like “I believe in change because I believe in you” are both honest and useful for leadership.

“A bold, knowing, charismatic creature neither male nor female”: Camille Paglia remembers a hero, David Bowie

www.salon.com|David Daley

Longtime Salon contributor and columnist Camille Paglia has often hailed David Bowie as one of her central influences. Her book “Sexual Personae” was influenced in many ways by Bowie — and then he heralded it on his list of 100 favorite books which went viral again yesterday after his death. London’s Victoria & Albert Museum asked Paglia to write the catalog essay on Bowie and gender for its blockbuster 2013 show of Bowie’s costumes, which is still touring internationally. 

David Bowie had staying power: “The one thing you have to say about Bowie is that he never coasted”

www.salon.com|Scott Timberg

David Bowie’s death is difficult to come to terms with for all kinds of reasons, in part for its suddenness and the complexity of Bowie’s achievement. Part of what’s striking about Bowie is his ability to range between genres: He was an inspiration for alternative and indie rock despite coming a generation before those fields started.

The Hero’s Journey: The idea you never knew had shaped “Star Wars”

www.salon.com|John Higgs

The opening of the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s proposed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune, would have been the most ambitious single shot in cinema.

It was to begin outside a spiral galaxy and then continuously track in, into the blazing light of billions of stars, past planets and wrecked spacecraft. The music was to be written and performed by Pink Floyd. The scene would have continued past convoys of mining trucks designed by the crème of European science fiction and surrealist artists, including Chris Foss, Moebius and H.R. Giger. We would see bands of space pirates attacking these craft and fighting to the death over their cargo, a life-giving drug known as Spice. Still the camera would continue forwards, past inhabited asteroids and the deep-space industrial complexes which refine the drug, until it found a small spacecraft carrying away the end result of this galactic economy: the dead bodies of those involved in the spice trade.

The shot would have been a couple of minutes long and would have established an entire universe. It was a wildly ambitious undertaking, especially in the pre-computer graphics days of cinema. But that wasn’t going to deter Jodorowsky.

This scale of Jodorowsky’s vision was a reflection of his philosophy of filmmaking. “What is the goal of life? It is to create yourself a soul. For me, movies are an art more than an industry. The search for the human soul as painting, as literature, as poetry: movies are that for me,” he said. From that perspective, there was no point in settling for anything small. “My ambition for Dune was for the film to be a Prophet, to change the young minds of all the world. For me Dune would be the coming of a God, an artistic and cinematic God.

“For me the aim was not to make a picture, it was something deeper. I wanted to make something sacred.”

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The ambivalence of motherhood is a touchy subject that violates one of our greatest taboos: not liking your children. It’s a topic of conversation that rises to the surface of our social consciousness when we gawk at horrors like Andrea Yates murdering her children, or the trial of Casey Anthony. Since society has no use for bad mothers except as scapegoats, these conversations are often didactic and are repressed often as soon as they begin. But in fiction, we can examine with empathy that which horrifies us in real life. Thus, novels become the purgatory of problematic mothers, where the guise of fiction acts as a protective shield.

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Irony has, in the past two decades or so, become a hot object of scrutiny. Yet, in hilarious and ironic fashion, despite this scrutiny, irony seems only to have become more deeply ensconced in our everyday mode of being — ensconced to such a point that Christy Wampole called irony “the ethos of our age” and went on to instruct that prior attempts at sincerity had failed — that we have now entered a nearly hopeless phase of Deep Irony.

Western Civilization has been going to the dogs for so long that it’s tempting to pipe up, like an aggravating child from the back seat during a long road trip, and ask if we’re there yet. According to Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, we are. His new book “Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society”announces that culture — at least as we used to understand it — is now officially “dead.” Sure, it might survive in a few “small social enclaves, without influence on the mainstream,” but everywhere else it has been replaced with mere entertainment.

Poetry has dropped so far out of the cultural mainstream in the U.S. that even seeing a great poem mangled, manhandled or misunderstood almost makes us smile. Every time a high-school commencement speaker makes glibly confident use of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” or a bad movie takes a verse of Auden places it should not go, part of us cringes. And part of us goes, “OK, cool, we’re glad someone is getting those names and those lines out there.” Ditto with the few phrases of Poe, Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg that get smuggled into pop culture.

To complain about the absence of real political debate and the massive vulgarity of American culture – and mea culpa, dude, I do it all the time – has the veneer of a reasonable, civic-minded adult perspective. But on a philosophical and epistemological level, it’s also a refusal to reckon with reality. If the only politics we actually have are the politics of culture – of symbolism and representation and media spectacle – then we have to fight on that terrain or give up entirely.

For some time now, one of the top Google search suggestions for my name has been, “Tracy Clark-Flory husband.” At first, I chalked it up to the simple fact that I’ve written about my husband a bunch in personal essays and even the odd sex toy review. Maybe people just wanted to see who this guy was who was willing to have his intimate life written about so candidly, I thought. Indeed, he’s tried out everything from “Siri for sex” to a “blow job robot,” all in the name of journalism — or at least my journalism career. Increasingly, though, I’ve started to suspect that there is more to it.

LaBeouf’s hot rant for the evening centered on the difference between “representational” and “presentational” performance, as he compared his previous work with Har’el — on the music video for Sigur Rós’ “Fjögur Piano” — with his recent Sia video “Elastic Heart.” He also managed to diss Al Pacino in the process, because why not.