Sublime

Maybe those were the last days when something could be truly obscure. Not in the basic sense that a style or song might be esoteric. But there was a precariousness to out-of-the-way knowledge, a sense that a misfiled book or forgotten magazine could easily be lost forever. Learning about something a few minutes before everyone else converted to a k

... See more

Taylor called this authenticity, and it became the unreachable horizon of modern life. It’s a concept that makes sense only in its absence; we recognize inauthenticity, phoniness, when someone’s clearly being a poseur. Yet the struggle to feel authentic—this is very real, even if we know better. In Taylor’s telling, everyone becomes a kind of artis

... See more

I was always thinking about the past, pursuing other people’s memories and dashed dreams. The aspect of my course work I loved was the archival research, snooping through boxes of old files, looking for ways to access some deeper understanding of someone’s art. I was fascinated by the kinds of stories you could tell with the things someone left beh

... See more

The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste . The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toi... See more