Mitch Therieau
Into the Right-Wing Dreamworld | DHS’s Regime of Images
Mitch Therieau
In the video, the penguin waddles across a frozen expanse. He is heading away from his colony, into Antarctica’s vast interior, alone. Nothing can stop his solitary march: even if he were caught and returned to the colony, we learn from the sandpapery, Teutonic voice of Werner Herzog, he would set right back out toward the mountains. “But why?” Herzog asks. The video’s caption answers: “Americans have always known ‘why.’”...
Agit-Slop | The White House’s Numbing Aesthetic
Mitch Therieau
In the video, two brown-skinned men — shot mostly from their torsos down, the camera rising briefly to reveal glimpses of faces and a tattooed neck — stand handcuffed in front of an airplane. They are marched up the jetway, before receding into a warm blur. Two words stand out below the haze, painted in bright green lettering on the side of what looks like a truck: “BORDER PATROL.” The...
Dream of Antonoffication | Pop Music’s Blandest Prophet
Mitch Therieau
Nearly two centuries into the history of recorded sound, there is still no neat place for the producer in the mythology of pop music. He — as an ideal type, he is nearly always a he — is both a major and a minor character. He is at once a visionary creator and a bland executor of technical procedures, a name brand with star power and an anonymous functionary. He...
All Roll Is B-Roll | Adam Curtis Goes Quiet
Mitch Therieau
Is there anything left to say about Adam Curtis? Over the course of more than 25 BBC documentaries, depending on how you count — each an attempt to trace the workings of what he repeatedly, enigmatically calls “power” across the twentieth century to the wreckage of the present — the director has developed a sensibility so idiosyncratic that it simultaneously begs for and preempts parody. Along the way, he has...
Vibe, Mood, Energy | Or, Bust-Time Reenchantment
Mitch Therieau
The products of mass culture have learned to speak a new language: the language of the occult. Come in, an app pleads, and listen to an algorithmically curated playlist of songs that “fit the vibe.” “We caught a vibe!” yelps a voice in one of those songs; it isn’t immediately clear whether this means caught as in brass ring or caught as in disease. It’s hard, a marketing email laments,...
