Byline: Jacob O. Gold

One Word, One Heart

Walking through the offices of Clure Concept Inc., twenty stories above the throbbing midtown traffic of a Tuesday afternoon, the scene is typical. Phones purr behind cubicle walls, young execs file out of transparent conference rooms. These hurried sharp-lookers could be selling insurance or optical fibers, analyzing market data or brokering mergers.

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When Times Get Shitty, Culture Gets Good

It’s four more years, and if history’s taught us anything, it’s that you can gas a lot of people in four years.

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The Heady Days of Grade Inflation

Those were the heady days of grade inflation, now long since past. Those were the days of rowdy shouting and whispered promise, vanished now like the morning mist.

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Which Starlet Are You Most Like?

Hillary Duff’s gonna be SOOO mad

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Ten Years of Infinite Sadness

Ten years ago this month, in Chicago, Illinois, the Smashing Pumpkins began to record their third album, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.” A child born in that year is fast approaching the age at which we heard that album … Read More

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Secret Charlie Rose

Note: Charlie Rose is a talk show host who speaks with notables from around the globe in a casual across-the-table setting that floats mysteriously in a formless black void. Everybody knows that. But what “viewers like you” don’t know is … Read More

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One Man’s Hunt for the Retro Vest of Tomorrow

Writer’s note: I typed this thing before seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and then after I saw it I felt scooped. So don’t get hung-up about it, just be fascinated by how much all this stuff is in the ether, as they say.

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Whitman College: The College Years

So apparently they’re making a TV show about Whitman College, the new four-year residential college projected to open in 2006.

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The Phallic Fraternity

The films we watch, recorded images in motion, are brought to us by the camera’s privileged eye. The camera is privileged to “be there” when the actual moving bodies do their thing.

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Lascivious in Lascaux

The minute details of sex never escape the eye of the prehistoric human artist. What registers here is a fascination with the sexual that extends beyond its ritual fetishization in functional appeals to some magical force for human fertility or robust herds. This art is uncanny and wonderful because sex is not sublimated or displaced into some other visual language, but is itself sublime, itself celebrated.

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Culture Goes Commercial

Devon Avenue is the one of the northernmost major thoroughfares running east-west across the numbered grid of Chicago’s city streets. East-west streets are numbered at hundreds by their distance from latitude line zero, Madison Street, which cuts through the heart … Read More

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David Brundige Broke My Heart

David Brundige’s senior thesis production, “Pig Tails,” reviewed. “Go see ‘Pig Tails,'” writes Gold.

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