4/6: mixed genres

My brother called last night, but I didn't get to talk with him much because I was in the middle of doing some work for classes that couldn't be put off. So I spent some of my lunchtime today listening to his podcasts instead.

He has a site called Mixed Genres--a phrase that was used with some frequency in my family as we were growing up. When we were young, "mixed genres" wasn't usually considered a good thing--my parents would invoke the phrase as a way to describe aesthetic confusion. But as we got into high school and college, and as post-modernism became more prevalent, the idea of mixing genres (of creating aesthetic confusion of sorts) seemed kind of fun and we would joke about the term. My brother's podcasts put a different spin on the idea: he juxtaposes various performances and events he's recently attended in order to see what underlying threads-of-thought might be running through them.

In any case, I enjoyed spending some time with my brother's mixed-genre comments today.