...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."

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..."

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"

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

“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.

"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

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

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.

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.

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.