It’s fashionable to decry the derivative nature of much current American entertainment; my son Colin’s favorite example would be Rambo: First Blood, Part II, which reads like a parody of the unimaginative nature of much contemporary American film. Then there are the American remakes of foreign originals: as a group, they’re taken to demonstrate how [...]
A quick follow-up on my December 13 posting about John Lennon & Yoko Ono: I’d suggested, there, that Yoko was the second great artistic collaborator of John’s life, after Paul McCartney. Not that controversial an assertion, I suppose, but I was pleased to see this confirmation in the newest (Dec. 23) issue of Rolling Stone, [...]
Just a quick one today, a placeholder, while my head is turned by the sublimer pleasures of end-of-semester grading, and preparing next year’s departmental budget. Quick quiz: what’s wrong with this picture? Oh, all right, of course: almost everything’s wrong. It’s a completely crap picture; taken with my iPhone, and rather stealthily, lest I be thought [...]
Yesterday, I pleaded for two more days to finish talking about Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video—but I’m going to finish up here today instead. The second visual plot within the first section of the “Bad Romance” video concerns what I call “Sailor Moon Gaga,” who is wrest from her bathtub by Russian supermodel kidnappers (while [...]
Lady Gaga’s got nothing very new going on right now: a new, eagerly awaited album in the can, of course, but for now, a temporary lull in her frentetic output. And during that lull, I was asked by a student group on campus to address the question: “What, if anything, is new about Lady Gaga’s presentation of [...]
I closed last time by writing, “When we remember John’s death, that’s the first thing I’d like for us to think of: that rock has had its geniuses, even if it maintains a wary relationship to them.” The other thing is that genius loves company. John & Paul morphed into John & Yoko quite publicly, [...]
When I think of the murder of John Lennon—murder, assassination?—the picture in my mind’s eye is of his iconic eyeglasses, lying at some distance from his body, on the sidewalk outside the Dakota. I’ve never seen such a picture; to the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t exist, unless inside some sealed NYPD or FBI [...]
The Beatles broke up when I was in sixth grade; I remember a kid named Hugh—can’t remember his last name now, forty years on—came to school one day, crying, with the news. I remember, too, that it meant next to nothing to me: an oldest child can languish behind the curve when it comes to [...]