Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) The Lumière Brothers

The Kiss (1896) William Heise

Modern Failure

The Fall 2014 version of my Modern Revolution course came out of the work of my dissertation, Broken: Thought-Images of Life in the State of Exception. The third chapter of that work, “Failure,” sketched out the outlines of a theory of modern failure. What can it mean to think modernism as failure? While it certainly […]
Haunted Reflections: Walter Benjamin in San Francisco

Brian Eno, Chris Cutler, and John Oswald on the Technological Reproducibility of Music

The essays by Eno and Cutler are seminal. I am also including Oswald’s essay. These are from an Anthology, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Cox and Warner. Brian Eno, “The Studio as Compositional Tool,” John Oswald, “Bettered by the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical Debt,” and “Plunderphonia” by Chris Cutler Audio Culture.PDF
Georges Méliès — Le voyage à travers l’Impossible
