My apologies in advance—or in arrears, perhaps—to any and all fcrp readers who have both heard, and are utterly fed up with, this Justin Bieber party trick. It’s hard for a guy with a day job to keep up with the speed of sound, even when the sound’s this slow. Maybe Hipster-hated Chris Martin can [...]
Thanks to my friend Michael Coyle for today’s provocation. The term “hipster”—which just a couple of years ago would have seemed as lame and dated as “cat” or “daddy-o”—has inexplicably become “hip” again. Pomona student Tim McKee wrote a great paper about this last year; I owe most of what I know about it to [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
Well, this is an interesting problem to have: the comments on yesterday’s post, from Ken, Scott, Susie, Tim—they’re just wonderful. Between them, amongst them, they’ve effectively stolen my “thunder”—and seem, without having seen it, to be running through Steve’s outline on the topic, as well. I’d thought it would take a couple more posts to [...]
![[shrugs] “I only like their really early stuff....”](http://www.fakechineserubberplant.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Cake_Motorcade_of_Generosity-150x150.jpg)
I’m grateful to fcrp reader Steve for a suggestion that I’d like to follow out for the next few days. For various scheduling reasons, I’m going to ease into it slowly: i.e., classes start at Pomona College two weeks from today, and Kevin isn’t nearly ready. It’s perhaps fitting then that he devote a bit [...]
To the Faithful: Today should be Mystery Science Auditorium, fcrp‘s exciting audio-visual feature. But the well’s dry, the imaginarium empty: can’t find any great web video today to pontificate about. So if you have any ideas please do send them, and we’ll see what we can do next week? This week instead, on the theory that [...]
[Thanks to fcrp reader and my buddy Michael Coyle for the link for today’s post.] I’ve come to think of it as a fundamental human characteristic, though perhaps it’s primarily an American trait: we’ve got to believe that we’re unique, different, special. “I wish I was special / You’re so fuckin’ special,” as The Man sez. [...]
A couple of field notes from the last week or so in this Summer of Gaga. First the serious: The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, is now holding anti-Lady Gaga rallies outside her concerts. The “church” (as a Christian myself, how I hate to use that word here!) rose to infamy when it chose to [...]
Oh, I love it when a day’s as easy as this one: when the Internet just drops a blog post right into your lap! There’s been a lot of buzz about the current Old Spice shower gel commercials, of course, and I’d halfway thought about writing on them—except that they’ve been massively covered already, with [...]