The Bad News Bears
In life, as in baseball, things can always get better. Or worse.
Josh Glenn
Josh Glenn is a Boston- and Kingston (NY)-based consulting semiotician. He is cofounder of the consultancy Semiovox, editor of the websites SEMIOVOX and HILOBROW, and founding editor of The MIT Press's proto-sf RADIUM AGE series. He is an adjunct instructor at RISD and convenor of the monthly online Semiofest Sessions. His books include The Idler's Glossary, Significant Objects, and the family activities guide Unbored. In the ’90s, Josh published the intellectual zine/journal Hermenaut; in the 2000s, he was a founding staffer and columnist for the Boston Globe's IDEAS section.
Taking the Mickey
A marvelous proliferation of Mickey’s meaning.
Raising Arizona
A blank affect can be a canny psychic-survival stratagem.
Nobrow Mickey
“It’s on America’s tortured brow / that Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow.”
Young and Innocent
It’s not about right vs. wrong, it’s about wit vs. shit.
“I’m the Mouse”
The origins of today's rich, imaginative Mickey-scape.
Buckaroo Banzai
For one moment, it seemed as though the Eighties might turn out OK.
Seth’s Dominion
"I am still trying to approach my work with the same intentions I had as a child."
Sixties Backlash
Parody is an art form for "children who have had imposed upon them a meaningless iconography."
Barbarella
In its silly way, this is a movie about female sexual power.
Meet the Semionauts
"Between the experiential cunning of the animal and the more self-disciplined and attentive cunning of the man."
Fifties Backlash
"Disney sold him into slavery, and he’s nothing. He's nothing."
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
A non-compact topological group of bare-breasted women in G-strings.
Thick Description (Abduction)
How do we identify codes, and in doing so begin to construct a meaning matrix?