Circularity in Storytelling — with The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers of Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022).

It’s simple: The story ends where it begins.

Circular storytelling means that some elements from the beginning of the story (re-)appear at the end of the story. Elements (re-)appearing at the end of the story are usually in a stark contrast to the elements at the beginning of the story.

Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022) is a heart-warming story that ema

Parasite (2019) Review: A Violent Collision of Two Worlds Seen through the Eyes of Bong’s Camera

Directed by Bong Joon-ho, Parasite (2019) is a Korean dark comedy drama that masterfully exposes the reality of class division, following two families whose worlds violently collide as one infiltrates the life of the other. Apart from telling the story of the two families through the movie’s plot, Bong uses the visual architecture of the movie and beautiful camera movements to emphasise the contrasting worlds of the families.

Parasite starts as a light-hearted comedy. We’re introduced to the Ki

Everyone Seems to be Confused about Design, and That's Okay

Even to David Kelley, founder of the famous Stanford d.school and IDEO, a globally renowned product design company, design “has always been a funny word” (cited in
Camacho 2016, p. 88).

Today, as philosopher of art and culture Tsion Avital (2017) would argue, everything can be presented as a work of art, and everyone thinks that their opinion ultimately legitimizes what constitutes a piece of art.

In turn, any designed artifact can pass as a work of art, as long as someone identifies it as such, and this, according to Avital, lies at the heart of the confusion between art and design.

Jazz In The USSR: Freedom, Popular Culture, And ‘The Decadent West’

Feeling a bit jazzy today? Not in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The USSR and jazz had a love-hate relationship ever since the country’s formation in the early 1920s. To give an example, during his fruitful career, Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich wrote three ballets: The Golden Age, op. 22 (1929-30), The Bolt, op. 27 (1931), and The Bright Stream, op. 39 (1935).

The Bolt follows the story of Lazy Lyonka, a worker in a Soviet factory, who, together with an anti-Soviet plotter, decides to sabotage the factory’s machinery by putting a bolt into it. Their plan, however, is quickly foiled by Komsomol, a political youth organization of the USSR