At its worst, Kruger’s prose sounds like a ditto prepared for Postmodernism 101: “History has been the text of the dead dictated to the living, through a voice which cannot speak for itself. The ventriloquist that balances corpses on its knee, that gives speech to silence, and transforms bones and blood into reminiscences, is none [...]
Visually, the Pacer is the concert venue writ small, with three of the five passengers wearing rock t-shirts; its distinctive (ugly) contours suggest a listening space, albeit an extraordinarily cramped, and necessarily intimate, one. The scene is funny and familiar; heavy-metal kids, headbanging in the suburbs, trying to make some fun. But they’re also, in [...]
More significant, perhaps, is the fact that much of the communal activity of rock-music consumption has been driven underground. Given the copyright maximalism of legislation like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the hyperactive enforcement regime of the Recording Industry Association of America—whose prosecutorial zeal against college students since January 2003 has been [...]
Those headphones on our students bother teachers because they seem to symbolize a voluntary deafness and a concomitant isolation. Allan Bloom put it most memorably, if artlessly, when he complained in The Closing of the American Mind that “as long as they [our students] have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition [...]