In its self-conscious quest to be different, HBO and its writers regularly dare each other into fresh, and sometimes questionable, territory.
That's why Mr. Seo is not ashamed of half-measures in his quest for "conscious style," a term he has trademarked and something he practiced in renovating his parents' home in Pennsylvania -- for the book.
Now the environmentally conscious can continue their quest to clean up this dump we call Earth by requesting to be buried near Lismore Memorial Park Cemetery in the Northern Rivers region of Australia.
From Teddy Roosevelt to the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, fears about "race suicide" and "human weeds" were common among self-conscious progressives, who saw the quest for a better gene pool as of a piece with their broader dream of human advancement.
For years, there was a mumbled consensus that A Tribe Called Quest, with its socially conscious lyrics and avaricious sampling, was hip-hop for college-educated white people who were frightened by Ice Cube.
In its barren but suggestive landscape, its gallows humor and the defeating near-futility of Hobart's quest, "Horse" feels like a conscious homage to Beckett.
Q-Tip's influential conscious hip-hop outfit A Tribe Called Quest played the New York City dates of West's Yeezus tour – which Q-Tip said would be the band's final shows.
Certainly aids gives new urgency to the feminist campaign for female sexual self-determination, and has probably done a lot, at both conscious and unconscious levels, to frame that quest in negative rather than positive terms.
She read Malcolm X and Assata Shakur, and listened to socially conscious hip-hop by Rakim and A Tribe Called Quest.
It made her conscious of a peculiarly 21st-century agony in which "the quest for love and sexual intimacy swims against the tide of a therapised world that deconstructs love and a cynical internet world that commodifies sex".
At the same time, Joe is a genuine idealist, pursuing his quest in the teeth of opposition from an expenses-conscious editor.
