[Gentle Readers, 1 more week of classes! Mountains of papers to grade! You'll forgive me, please, if I fall back on a piece of older writing for this week's Mystery Science Auditorium---a piece that will take us through the weekend, in fact, on the film version of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. I hope you'll enjoy [...]
So I’ve made a new rule for my students: the word “interesting” has been abolished from their writing vocabularies. I’m working on eliminating it from my own, too. Here, briefly, is why. In critical discussion, “interesting” is quite meaningless. The new M.I.A. video is . . . interesting. Is that good or bad? The new [...]
Changes in the format and delivery of music—in both technology and packaging—would seem to have spelled the death of context for contemporary popular music, liner notes being only one element of that context. Our music has become much more a part of our multitasking lifestyle, only rarely indulged in as the sole focus of our [...]
But liner notes are not necessarily groundbreaking. Of the 45 Grammy winners, historic and retrospective albums have the edge. Both the 1978 and 1979 awards, for instance, went to the notes for Bing Crosby reissues; for the past five years, the award has gone to the notes for historic reissues of the music of Fats [...]
[I threatened, about a week ago, to run a story I'd written about the demise of liner notes; here it is. It was written almost two years ago, so a couple of temporal references are no longer quite accurate; I haven't attempted to correct them. I was also shocked to see that I'd rehearsed my [...]
What’s the minimal semantic unit of the pop song? What’s the smallest particle that contains the information we require to “name that tune”? Based on my experience using Shazam on my iPhone, the answer must be, “very tiny.” For those not familiar, Shazam is an application that can sample and process the audio stream of [...]
Yeah: so literally, This Picture: This is a store in Claremont, my home town: a shop called Authentix. Here’s how it presents itself on the web: New Sneaker & Clothing Boutique bringing Skate and Hip-Hop culture together in a comfortable little spot in The Claremont Village. Come through and visit us to see what’s new, [...]
[It's late Thursday, and tomorrow's post should be a Mystery Science Auditorium post; and ordinarily, I don't post until 5:00 a.m. PST. But I have exciting news today, big enough to break both of those self-imposed rules, just this once. So here's Friday's post, on Thursday night.] For reasons both professional and personal, it’s a [...]
Last week I was invited, along with a philosopher and a sociologist, to participate in a roundtable on campus on the status of the intellectual in contemporary culture. Actually, the focus of the debate was supposed to be “intellectualism,” which struck me as a somewhat loaded term, hence one I sort of quarreled with and [...]
My thesis, in yesterday’s post, was that Twitter and Facebook together have made attending a conference a lot richer, and a lot more complicated. Which are perhaps two ways of saying the same thing. Richer (cont.): I’m sure all of this—the invasion of conferences by Twitter and Facebook—isn’t news to many of you; I’m sure [...]