writing

Javelin by Sufjan Stevens: An album review turned diary entry

Javelin is mysterious and unbridled, it shows Sufjan returning to a familiar groove of his awesome folk songs— songs that are unafraid to evolve with more lavish instrumentations and amazingly potent lyrics.

Here Sufjan says goodbye to something that should last forever. It’s a powerful opener which sets the theme of the album rather bluntly. The song comes with a great display of flowery vocals, choir-like harmonies, and intricately woven electronic moments...
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2023
Review

Temporalities in the Capitalocene

The disruption of deep time cycles by capitalist endeavours has resulted in a wave of justified existentialism. Our perceptions are distorted, short-sighted, narrowly telescoped on phantom values; ecological and environmental interaction are left to suffer...
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2021
Essay

A Rhetorical Analysis of Opposition in Queen & Slim

Rhetoric is means to understand human motivation. Messages can be communicated via symbolic, aesthetic, and artistic actions. In other words, we often rely on means beyond language to get our point across. While more indirect and subtle, artistic communication can be persuasive in different and possibly more resonant ways. Let’s look at the 2019 film Queen and Slim to see this in practice masterfully.
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2021
Essay

Bob Dylan and The Great Comedy of ‘Visions’

On December 3rd 1965 Bob Dylan sat down at a table in front of twenty or thirty reporters for a press conference put on by KQES in San Francisco. The host briefly introduces the songwriter and then turns to the press says “go.” “Oh my god,” says Bob Dylan. Dylan’s spectacular rise to fame in the 1960s led to many instances of which the songwriter engaged with the press in weird and sometimes absurdly funny ways.
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2020
Essay

Advertising Mindfulness

Advertising by meditation and well-being application companies are invitations to become rhetors. The content the apps offer help in becoming persuasive in dialogues with the self. The brands suggest that by meditating, we can identify better with our minds. Burke writes of persuasion. It is only useful when it speaks to the “voice within” to quote Burke. Calm and Headspace speak to that inner desire to improve, transform, and improve, and this can all be done with a simple, personal, digital software.
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2020
Essay

Food Insecurity in Canada

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many social issues, one of them being the crisis of food insecurity. Food insecurity is a blanket term used to describe a variety of food and health related problems. Namely, it is defined by Health Canada as the inability to acquire or consume an adequate diet quality or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways, or the uncertainty that one will be able to do so.  

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2022
Essay

Framing Protest: New Waves of Environmental Visibility

When we discuss climate change, we can classify messages as either one of two narratives: (1) future threats or (2) current impacts already damaging communities in the present. The latter is seriously overlooked. Impacts of climate change already have taken effect in many places, and mainstream media has generally evaded the program of distributing that knowledge.

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2021
Essay