broadcastellan
broadcastellan
The Mortician and the Masses: Aldous Huxley’s “The Perversion of Values” (1926) Reconsidered
“Something is happening on the western shore of the Atlantic.” Aldous Huxley said as much. To be sure, given the long stretch of this vaguely defined region, something is bound to happen there at any time. Huxley was in fact referring to the United States of America when he made that statement in his article…
“The Same Boat”: Replaying Marcelle Hanselaar’s “Crying Game” in Times of War on Empathy
The works in The Same Boat, which I guest-curated for/at Gallery Gwyn, Aberaeron, are derived entirely from Marcelle Hanselaar’s print portfolio The Crying Game. Returning to that series now allows me to show not only how familiar these scenarios of conflict are to us still but how fundamentally the world has changed nevertheless since Hanselaar began…
“I could live my own life, on the air”: Ginger Rogers, Patriarchy Disincarnate, and the Raging Ageism behind AI
News these days being as dire as it comes, with the rise of fascism in my native Germany and my former second home, the US, foremost on my mind—with the related ascendance of AI and its foretold extermination of humanity thrown into the bargain—I am, as if clinging to bygone fictions to which I can…
Enveloped: Covers, Openings, and the Outside Chance of Queer Interiority
Down memory lane. Sounds rather cozy, when you put it like that. The kind of trip an afternoon with an old photo album on your lap can afford. But that is not the lap I have been taking, the road I just went down and took back. Not even a road, really, and certainly no…
“Hello, Big Boy,” Goodbye: Thoughts Occasioned by Sherwood Anderson’s Independence Day “Inquiry into America’s Progress” (1926)
“Nations are like people,” the US American novelist, short fiction writer and poet Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) remarked in 1926. “It takes a long, long time for one of them to grow up.” That year—that month—the United States was commemorating its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary, which prompted Anderson to add: As a nation we are still young.…
When in Rome (1970): With Ngaio Marsh at the Villa Giulia
I had never been to Rome, that teeming aggregation of antiquities to which all roads ostensibly, and, as it appears, inevitably lead. Eventually, that is. Years of German high school Latin, drummed into me at a school not far from the Roman outpost of Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (Cologne), did little to raise my curiosity…
Some Mike It Hot: Tuning in Marilyn Monroe on the Eve of Her One-Hundredth Birthday
Monroe’s voice rendered a hot mike redundant. At once torrid and tender, it smolders rather than blazes. Carrying promises of pleasure and warmth, it has the charm of a lullaby sung on what could not be anything but a sleepless night of reverie. Many such a night I spent as a teenage boy, alone in my…
“The Present Fad of Self Confession” (1926): Aldous Huxley and the Paper “monster of spiritual impudicity”
I readily admit to having a thing about anniversaries, however obscure. They are an invitation to catch up with whatever I missed first time round, especially if I was not around at the time. The century marker in particular offers an opportunity—or a pretext, if ever I needed one—to dwell on bygone media events and the popular…
Leaping at “Elastic”: Resourceful Play, Perpetual Replayfulness, and the Inflexibility of the Museal Dis-playground
“Not by any stretch of the imagination.” That is what a friend of mine used to say—and perhaps says it still—whenever something struck him as unreasonable or preposterous. Considering how firmly the expression remained stuck in the layers of my neocortex after all those decades, much struck him that way—and, to this day, much does strike me…
“… this Land of the Cretin and Home of the Depraved”: US Radio Naysaying Anno 1926 and the Silencing of So-called “Legacy Media” in the Age of AI Slop
I was tickled—or, rather, pricked—by the snide remarks a certain John Wallace made in the April 1926 issue of Radio Broadcast, in which he expounded on “Radio and the Taste of the Nation.” In particular, Wallace took issue with the assertion that the new medium was threatening to turn the United States into the “Land of…
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