Pretentious Nonsense

   

An Abstract Drawing
Madge Gill (1882-1961)
Image Credit:: London Borough of Newham Heritage Service [CC  BY] 

                                                      

Further and deeper into the jungle. Taunted by the quivering vines, mocked by the rubber trees, bitten and bruised by the asphyxiating vileness of nature. Ropes groaning, mud and rock resisting... The jungle plays tricks on your senses... Can you still tell the difference between the reality and the hallucination, between everyday life and the dream? Why haul a steamship across the jungle? Why bring the opera to Iquitos? But of course if you have to ask these questions, you shall never know the answers. Werner Herzog famously dragged a real 320-tonne steamship over the Andes while making his monumental, disaster-strewn 1982 film Fitzcarraldo...

Jonathan Liew watches Manchester United's Carabao Cup fixture against Grimsby Town, The Guardian.

I swill a sip around my mouth before drinking. It's a weird sensation. The water is so soft and smooth that it almost slides, rather than flows, off my tongue. It's like drinking an Hermes scarf.

Simon Osborne investigates expensive bottled water in restaurants, The Guardian

Partly it is the allegory of milk, the pursed mouth of a graphic designer on a coffee cup as a surrogate for the Madonna del Latte, the thousands of medieval depictions of Jesus nursing at Mary's breast. Grown men drinking milk has always been laden in symbolism, the blend of nurture and eroticism evocative of a sexual infantilization. It is why so many films from A Clockwork Orange to Babygirl centre milk as poison beyond a place of regular intoxication.

Sam Wolfson on why "milky drinks are shorthand for liberal" when drunk by "performative males", The Guardian

When dildos become airborne at WNBA games more than once, the meaning shifts. It reveals the collapse of coherence under TikTok's attention economy. These aren't protests or insults that make a point. They're spectacles. The goal is to provoke. In a memetic landscape poisoned by irony, absurdity is the point. The dildo isn't symbolic. Its function is noise.

Lee Escobedo investigates the phenomenon of fans throwing sex toys on to the court during women's basketball games, The Guardian