Arts & Culture

Elfbar Ideology, Pt. III: Notes on Extinction

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Imagine if Paul Revere rode into Lexington only to realize that the British had already begun to sack the town. He continues into the fray: “The British are coming! The British are coming!”

This seems to be the situation of climate activism today. The British are already here: Some scientists say that we have already hit the “point-of-no-return” for the enduring health of our climate. The Paris Climate Agreement pinned it at 1.5 degrees celsius past pre-industrial levels. Now that we have smashed the ceiling, we are left to wonder why the sky didn’t fall.

Arts & Culture

PROFILE | Paragon

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I was in Atlantic City for a weekend with Kyle Wolf ’25. It was there, in the Bally’s hotel somewhere above the casinos, that I asked if he wanted to make some music. We both brought MIDI keyboards when we met at his car before the trip, pointing at each other like that Spider-Man meme. 

Courtesy of Sofia Egol

He hadn’t made afrobeats before, but I was curious about his limits. We listened to Tyla’s “Water” for reference, and Kyle replicated the drums. I envied that he could do it without any serious effort — it was just a matter of listening to the first 30 seconds of the song and tapping the pattern on the piano. But he couldn’t let the song contain him; he let go of the reference and it became some sort of jazz fusion.

Arts & Culture

SOLAR FLARE | Songs for the Walk Home

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How do I drag my body home from campus on a weekday afternoon? With the help of “Sunshine,” off of Work of Art by Asake. A gentle release from academic anxiety: “Sun’s gon’ shine on everything you do.” 

Arts & Culture

The Oscars: Glazer’s Speech

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Somebody was going to mention Palestine. This we knew. After all, the Academy asked a room of cynical film executives and incisive artists to celebrate themselves in front of a live television audience. What more could we expect than a spitting contest of performative agendas? We should concede, first, that the Oscars have always been a charade.

Arts & Culture

Music Lately: “Von Dutch,” ‘Scrapyard,’ ‘Vultures’

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A phoenix! In I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You, Quadeca contemplates his life and loved ones from beyond the grave. His new mixtape Scrapyard sees him reborn with Ye-like confidence. “Room packed out with the fans,” he gloats on “Guess Who?”. “They said I was naive … ‘cause they couldn’t tell a masterpiece from a type beat.” They don’t doubt him anymore: Anthony Fantano rates Scrapyard a coveted “light 9.”

Scrapyard’s “Texas Blue” features Kevin Abstract, who underwent a rebirth of his own on Blanket.

Arts & Culture

Elfbar Ideology, Pt. II: On “Death Cult” Leftism

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Content Warning: This article includes graphic descriptions of suicide and commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Last month, I cited a TikTok about one woman’s decision to quit vaping in protest of labor conditions in the Congo. I wrote about the libidinal tendency for my generation to make sacrifices for victims of struggles that they have never felt. Not before the end of the month, Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell burned himself to death in protest of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. 

Levi Pierpont, a friend of the late Bushnell, wrote an Op-Ed for the Guardian this weekend. Pierpont urges us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater — the baby being Bushnell’s spirited opposition to genocide and the bathwater being the way by which he expressed that opposition. “Please, don’t forget Aaron,” he writes.

Arts & Culture

O.J. Simpson, the Iraq War and the Day Satire Died

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Henry Kissinger died and thus a spotlight shone on imperialist absurdity. A Tom Lehrer quote has re-emerged in the American zeitgeist: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.” Indeed, it is no secret that Kissinger killed millions. It is also no secret that O.J. Simpson very likely killed his wife. Yet, Simpson jests in a recent viral TikTok that he is a “slayer of the women.” In this way, Simpson reclaims the narrative — such blatant irony could only come from a subject wholly unaffected by his guilt. Any further condemnation of his moral corruption is futile; the comment section is only full of jokes because what is there to gain from saying, “Hey!

Arts & Culture

Against Mark Rober Vigilantism

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An unforgettable quote from a very forgettable movie: “Batman is a fascist!” DC’s latest Blue Beetle rides the wave of tokenist superhero films meant to vacuously pander to some corporate misconception of progressivism — yes, us progressives love cookie-cutter, AI-written afterthought action flicks so long as they promote BIPOC cultures in the same way that a NatGeo documentary promotes endangered birds. It’s reminiscent of that sentiment many Asian Americans felt from Crazy Rich Asians; it is the prerogative of out-of-touch Hollywood execs who want to cash in on the fact that they know about Hawker stalls from white people who don’t. 

That deliberately outrageous quip, though, should provoke a sympathetic response from any sincere liberationist. Who does Batman think he is? Did Spider-Man just throw a manhole at a homeless shoplifter down on his luck? I’m reminded of that thing filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu said: “I see heroes every day.

Arts & Culture

Elfbar Ideology: Reimagining the Death Drive

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Slavoj Zizek, a proponent of Jacques Lacan, describes the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive as “the fundamental libidinal stance of the human individual for self-sabotaging; the basic idea of psychoanalysis is the pursuit of unhappiness, people do everything possible not to be happy.” Plainly, the death drive is that tendency for rational beings to engage in self-destructive behaviors as a refusal of mortality. A medieval footsoldier will charge into certain death with the reassurance that God waits in the afterlife. The people of Gaza now stand their ground in the face of bombardment with that same reassurance. This is an archaic instantiation of death drive ideology to those that live in the contemporary West, in the heart of empire. But mortality transcends time and place.

Arts & Culture

‘Oppenheimer’

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This is the incoherency of a noncommittal Nolan who juggles ideas with little concern for where they land. He abuses Göransson’s score to foster some mirage of thematic cohesion.