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The main issue with inverse snobs is that they don't even understand that they're inverse snobs. They seem themselves as more enlightened cosmopolitans by trying to distance themselves from cosmopolitanism as an act of solidarity.

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But it's extremely hypocritical / parasitic for inverse snob cosmopolitans to feel bad about their own cosmopolitanism (a self-critique only possible because of meta-consciousness!) and believe that *we* should be a cosmopolitans but *they* should stay provincial

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I understand the impulse of _inverse snobbery_ to both (1) sympathize with non-cosmopolitans who see the world through bounded conventional framing, and (2) try to take the same value that non-cosmopolitans take from their own culture. Part of cosmopolitanism is to not immediately judge

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Cosmopolitanism is best understood as a form of meta-consciousness that lets you see through the arbitrariness of social convention, thus freeing yourself from unnecessary limitations on human perspective and opening up more value from more cultural experiences

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...analyzing what is already known to be popular, then slightly varying its pattern-sometimes very, very slightly-to create a marketable new version of the same."

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Here's a quote from Davis's book that doesn't seem to agree with the Moraes essay heralding New Jeans as a great new height of human symbolic endeavors: "all the resources of the capitalist ‘culture industry’ are focused exactly on the creative operation that AI does best..."

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The irony here is that I actually read "Art in the After-Culture." I very much enjoyed that the book's title can be sung to Aerosmith's "Love in an Elevator"

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Culture Seems Stagnant Because Everyone Is Exhausted, Not ‘Because of the Internet' | Artnet News

When you're BD-level good at your craft, you don't have to actually *read* the book to exclaim a derogatory opinion. We all remember his for-the-ages "I haven't read the book because it's not even out yet but I do know I hate it" take on Status and Culture from '22. news.artnet.com/art-world/cu...

news.artnet.com

Michelle Goldberg argues in the New York Times that the internet has caused cultural stagnation. She's misdiagnosing the problem.

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W. David Marx @wdavidmarx.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

"lofi beats to relax/study to" on the soundtrack at the Singapore hawker centre

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Reposted by W. David Marx

New York Times Opinion @nytopinion.nytimes.com · 30/09/2026

“America will still dominate the giant pop-culture spectacle, and the monopoly on cool, on the other hand, I think is probably over, that it is a more kind of multipolar world of cool,” W. David Marx says on “The Opinions,” discussing America’s soft power and its changing influence around the world.

nyti.ms

Opinion | America Used to Be Cool. What Happened?

The world order is changing. So is the United States’ place in it.

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Reposted by W. David Marx

Garbage Day @garbageday.email · 28/09/2026

Why "Choosin' Texas" doesn't feel like a hit www.garbageday.email/p/why-choosi...

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Reposted by W. David Marx

Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"Shklovsky repudiated the principle of artistic economy. He saw art as increasing the difficulty + span of perception "because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged"; he saw art as means of destroying automatism in perception." Eichenbaum

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Reposted by W. David Marx

Matt Alt @mattalt.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

RIP Toyohiro Akiyama, whose jaunt to space and back down to Earth mirrored the rise and fall of Japan’s Bubble economy. The 1990 trip could also be considered humanity's most ambitious livestreaming stunt. blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/the-salary...

blog.pureinventionbook.com

The Salaryman Spaceman

A rocket-powered rise and fall that mirrored Japan’s own

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W. David Marx @wdavidmarx.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did a long video on the connections between the history of denim production in Georgia and Japanese selvedge denim www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JSp...

youtube.com

Japan perfected ‘American’ denim. Can the South bring it back? | Full Episode

YouTube video by Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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W. David Marx @wdavidmarx.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I haven't published a newsletter in nine months, but I did today. Here is a new one about the fact that we no longer live in a world where the appreciation for fine art is a sinister tool of class distinction: culture.ghost.io/good-taste-i...

culture.ghost.io

Good Taste is Not What’s Oppressing Us in 2026

In an age where Donald Trump and tech barons hold the most political and economic power, Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas based on 1960s French Old Money may no longer provide the best guidance towards the eth...

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W. David Marx @wdavidmarx.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I spent an hour trying to figure out whether Beef was a joke on Meatloaf but Beef seems to have predated Meatloaf

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Flipper's Guitar - Doctor Head’s World Tower (Arbitrarily Remastered / Full Album HQ)

A direct influence of Head is the final Flipper's Guitar album Dr. Head's World Tower. The Japanese title of the album is ヘッド博士の世界塔, so the "Dr. Head" is a feeble translation for what they really mean: "a person with a PhD in the film Head." www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuz4...

youtube.com

YouTube video by マッチャポテトサラダ

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Head was a box office and critical failure, and the lack of immediate influence can make it seem only like an interesting relic; but it's important in the narrative of cinema today by being the representative work of psychedelic pop culture. Regardless it's a must watch.

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Head could only later be appreciated once audiences were removed from the original Monkees context. They either they encountered the band as Sixties kitsch or never knew how despised they were. With the original context gone, audiences could see Head as a landmark work.

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In fact, Head may be the high-water mark of Psychedelica, because everyone immediately tired of all these techniques and went back to "roots" earnest music and film. Rafelson's next film Five Easy Pieces is a complete negations of what he did with Head.

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The problem was that The Monkees were the stars, and everyone over 15 years-old hated them; so Monkees fans didn't get it, and avant-garde cinema fans wouldn't take it seriously. The film's underlying setup doomed it to be an artistic failure; its immediate influence on other cinema is unclear.

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As Hollywood cinema, it's perhaps the peak work of Psychedelica—dream logic narrative, intense cuts and superimpositions, solarized 35mm film, lysergic dance sequences, pastiches and parody, found footage, direct McLuhan references. Far more avant-garde than any Beatles films.

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The audio commentary clarifies that the film was not The Monkees trying to fight back against the intense loathing they experienced, as much as Rafelson trying to do a social satire of the Monkees using the actual Monkees, as a way to show he was above it all. I'm not sure it achieves this.

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