David Banash is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. He teaches courses in contemporary literature, film, and popular culture.
Features
Wednesday, June 15 2011
In Search of the Endless Summer: Surf Films
Surfing is a spectacle of sheer uselessness and excessive pleasure that most of us can only dream about. It provides an ideal image of how we desire to live -- devoted solely to a thrilling and utterly innocent pleasure.
Thursday, July 30 2009
It’s All Too Beautiful
A suspicion of beauty is vital if one hopes to have any relation to it that isn't completely compromised; as Walter Benjamin said, beauty is the other side of the coin of injustice.
Friday, August 15 2008
Collection Obsession: William Davies King's "Collections of Nothing"
Wrestling with objects, saving and ordering them, is a way to cope with flux, doubt, and the twin gods of sex and death. Banash deconstructs the human urge to collect all manner of stuff.
Thursday, February 7 2008
The Teenage Prayers [New York]
Bucking the "nostalgia band" trend by being authentically nostalgic, the Teenage Prayers cause you to give blessings to that raw, purely enthusiastic adolescent music fan in all of us.
Columns
Friday, January 13 2012
If at First You Don't Succeed, Failure May Be Your Style: 'The Queer Art of Failure'
Rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy.
Friday, August 5 2011
'Shock Value': What Men (and Boys) Really Fear
Jason Zinoman argues that the fantastic, Gothic monsters of the first half of the 20th century were replaced by a New Horror -- the monster right in front of your face.
Thursday, July 29 2010
Future Shock, Postmodern Nostalgia, and Uncanny Technologies
The speed of technological change is unprecedented. Author Anna Jane Grossman finds that it has imbued her "with a kind of odd nostalgia for right now.”
Reviews
Thursday, March 22 2012
'Low Budget Hell': From John Waters' 'Female Trouble' to 'Cry Baby'
A cautionary tale for those who dream of making it big, the title says it all. Low Budget Hell undoes the myths of filmmaking and reminds readers that not everyone makes it big in Hollywood, and that not making it is alright, too.
Monday, August 17 2009
Ferus by Roberta Bernstein & Kirk Varnedoe
Instead of the kind of comprehensive curatorial essay contextualizing and explaining the work it reproduces, this assumes a list of unadorned, unexplained names tells a story.
Friday, April 17 2009
The Grid Book by Hannah G. Higgins
This is a meditation on media, representation and technology, and makes for a deeply textured and luxurious reading experience.
Monday, February 16 2009
Ryan Seacrest Is Famous by Dave Housley
Housely uses Kerouac to describe what has happened to America with the rise of ubiquitous media that endlessly praises the corporate injunction to masturbatory self-improvement as consumption.
