Author: Cain S. Pinto

This author has written 35 articles
Read more about the article Music’s Life Offstage: The Return of Aura in Live Musical Performance

Music’s Life Offstage: The Return of Aura in Live Musical Performance

If you couldn’t attend music performances in the flesh you could still turn to a studio recording, which to the extent it was fully accessible still undeniably provided a simple acoustic phenomenon that conveyed the absolute musical totality. A thing quite unlike a meal in that it would be no better or worse if it were made right in front of you by the artist. Theorists like Walter Benjamin thought this would spell the end of the prestige accorded to live musical performances. They were, he was, premature in that judgement. Not only has aura returned, it has returned in a new, hypermobile form that attaches exclusively to live musical performances. Even as the spatiotemporal exclusivity of live music performance gathers its audience up into a spontaneously arising cult of authentic and vulnerable musical experience it excludes everyone not physically present to witness the spectacle. The discursive activity of concert attendees, and the cottage industry of concert review and reaction content, reify the identity of concert-goers as the audience segment uniquely qualified to identify and celebrate the full range of aesthetic qualities possessed by the music. But do concert-goers really get something aesthetically valuable from the music that those who listen to it privately on a studio recording don’t?

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Read more about the article What is the Meaning of Life? A Story We Tell

What is the Meaning of Life? A Story We Tell

Meaning talk in the lofty sense serves as laudatory gloss on behaviours one or one’s community is anyway disposed to practice and encourage. This explains both why meaning making is an inside job requiring personal negotiation between individuals’ and society’s abilities and constraints, and why one man’s meaning tends not to mean quite the same thing to everyone.

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Read more about the article Why Go There? A Defense of Travel Agnosticism

Why Go There? A Defense of Travel Agnosticism

Spelled out more concretely, with the inconvenient specificity of actual locales, cultures, and ethnic identities the praise heaped on travel as a beneficial transformative experience becomes untenable. Few well-intentioned people—though there will always be some—will encourage well-heeled foreigners to tour the slums of Uganda, imbibe warthog anuses with Namibian bushmen, or see themselves as fundamentally the same as Djiboutians, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalians, and Sudanese who practice female genital mutilation after attending one of the ghastly ceremonies. And those who would do so would struggle to demonstrate how any of these exercises could even in principle educate and broaden one’s mind, or expand one’s circle of empathy.  If the cures boasted of on travel’s behalf are illusory what then to make of the illnesses diagnosed in those immune to its charms?  

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Read more about the article Surviving Success: A Review of Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me

Surviving Success: A Review of Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me

You can hardly blame people for misunderstanding Britney and misconstruing her circumstances, but after the memoir it is all the harder to ignore their casual commentarial cruelty. Reports about Britney getting snapped partying panty-less with and without Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, marrying a childhood friend for a day, having a public meltdown and shaving her head for no clear reason made it really easy to conclude she was troubled if not severely mentally ill. Like a hit song taking on a life all its own, its words no longer restricted to the original text, scenes from her life constructed out of page three news and celebrity gossip columns took on the complexion of something very like but also much more narratively persuasive—simpler—than the life itself. For those used to construing everything Britney has said and done before, during, and after the thirteen years she spent under an exploitative conservatorship overseen by her ghoulish father Jamie Spears as being conditioned by her mental instability or personality flaws her memoir comes like a thief in the night.

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Read more about the article Sporting Lint: A Review of Pockets by Hannah Carlson
Sporting Lint: A Review of Pockets by Hannah Carlson

Sporting Lint: A Review of Pockets by Hannah Carlson

The beginning of wisdom about body language is the universal validity of the nostrum: keep your hands out of your pockets. The perdurable infamy associated with enjoying the mere power of containment besom pockets offer and the contradictory attitudes attributed to anyone consummating the mute repose of putting their hands in them shows we don’t always know why someone offends us—even if we think it has to do with what they do with their hands in our company. Hannah Carlson’s Pockets: An Intimate History of How we Keeps Things Close digs deeply, and eagerly probes for clues to the enigma of the pocket among the miscellany of fob watches, wallets, mobile phones, cosmetics, guns, and keys only—I think—to come up empty.

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Read more about the article Review: Amy Bruni’s Life With the Afterlife

Review: Amy Bruni’s Life With the Afterlife

Many people who believe in ghosts tend to outright disbelieve in the existence of cryptids, and aliens (Ch. 10). From a scientific point of view the existence of alien life seems vastly more probably than that of ghosts. If you believe in ghosts you can do worse than believing in Bigfoot. Not even Bruni wants you to believe everything you read, but reading about improbable things that just might be true is just plain good sense. 

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