So now that I’ve got your attention. I’d like to begin by reviewing with you a scene from a popular movie in which all of these elements come together. It is also the scene which, more than a decade ago, got me started thinking about all of this. I’ve discussed this scene from Wayne’s World [...]
In what I’m going to do over the next five days, my “reach” will far exceed my “grasp,” as the saying goes. For it seems to me that in a blog post (or even a series of related posts), one really has two choices: either to establish a modest goal and hit it, or else [...]
I know, I know: I’ve already written, and raved, about Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video (March 19-20). I’ve also written on fake chinese rubber plant, if briefly, about cover recordings (March 4, 6–7, 10): about how the best of them crack a song wide open, and make available readings of the original previously unimagined. Let me begin [...]
Wow. I’m teaching a senior seminar this semester on irony—on, especially, how tricky and unreliable irony becomes when it moves into the mass media in the second half of the twentieth century. Today, we talked about a very early episode of All in the Family, Norman Lear’s controversial 1970s sitcom that took on nearly every [...]