Not surprisingly—no surprise to me, anyway—discussions last night of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read with our first-year students were very animated and very smart. Each year we assign one common book for all of our incoming students to read, ostensibly as a kind of community-building exercise: All of our first-year [...]
I’m going to write today’s posts in two parts: the pre-freshman portion and the post-freshman portion. (We don’t really use the word “freshman” anymore, of course, but the phrase “pre-first-year students” just doesn’t work. The eye is offended.) Tonight (Sunday night), along with a couple dozen of my colleagues at Pomona College, I’ll be leading [...]
Thanks to fcrp reader Emily, who suggested the first video in today’s post—which led me, old guy that I am, to think of a couple of earlier examples of this kind of thing. So to begin at the beginning: here’s the video that Emily pointed me to, a subtle but instructive piece of performance art. [...]
If you opened this page hoping to find a discussion of Rihanna’s video for “Umbrella,” I’m sorry to have deceived you. Well, not “sorry,” exactly: I mean, I did it with malice aforethought. But that’s not exactly the agenda here today; rather this is a “meta-discussion” of the video—a discussion of a discussion of the [...]
I’m afraid I don’t have the space here today to develop the point, but my own sense is that if Daniel Johnston is a gifted artist, his gifts are more as a visual artist than as a musician. Many of his cartoons have circulated widely in popular and cyber culture; if you don’t realize that [...]
As promised/threatened yesterday—and what a vibrant conversation yesterday, y’all!—I want to work through some impressions of The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006), a pretty riveting documentary recommended to me by fcrp reader Steve. It turned out to be a great way to redeem a long stretch of otherwise exasperating insomnia last week. But you don’t [...]
So after the tough sledding of the past few days, it’s time for us all to frolic a bit in the shallow end of the cultural pool: it is, after all, still summer, and Labor Day’s just around the corner. Here, then, a parlor game: What are your ten favorite “rock movies”? That phrase wobbles [...]
OK, so this has been building up for a while; and rather than lurking around all snippy and defensive in the Comments section, really I need to mount a more thoughtful, and measured, response to this whole topic. And the topic, of course, is the charge that I “over-analyze” things. I’d like to begin by [...]
On Friday, discussing the public service announcement “Moms With Guns,” I trailed off by talking about the dangers of irony for conveying important political or social content. I’m a big fan of irony, as colleagues and friends know; but it’s a notoriously unreliable weapon—the Saturday-night special of rhetorical devices—and if you come packin’, you’d better [...]
Yup: 24 hours later, I still can’t get Cee-Lo out of my head. And he keeps cussing in there! Just a few more stray thoughts about “Fuck You,” on a Sunday morning. First, what a remarkable bridge, right? Cee-Lo holds it off until 2:40; that’s mighty late. The change in tenor, both musical and emotional, [...]