Well, after reading about the Quiet Man pub scheme in Bill Barich’s A Pint of Plain, and taking him to task yesterday for the breathless naiveté of his quest for the Perfect Pub, I thought I had a responsibility to my Faithful Readers to watch The Quiet Man again. In my memory of the film, [...]
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Kevin
[The second in a two-part post started yesterday, previously published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.] In the documentary All You Need Is Love (2008), Tony Palmer quotes Eric Burdon, of the Animals: “If you want to see what an American black is going through today, where his mind is at, go see Jimi Hendrix, [...]
[Regular readers of fcrp know Jean Tamarin, my editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education. This piece ran there first, last month, and is better (as always) for Jean's tender mercies. This is part one of a two-parter that we'll finish tomorrow.--K] The prejudices we absorb when young—musical, culinary, racial—are so very hard to overcome. [...]
[This Friday, Dear Readers, guest blogger Emily Dalton’s gonna break down Mystery Science Auditorium for you. Emily’s a freelance writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon, and a faithful reader of fake chinese rubber plant. Enjoy!] When I first saw this video it was widely available on American sites, but it has now been pulled—I [...]
I suggested yesterday that we might think of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” as a kind of alternative-rock power ballad, and I promised to run through the song’s emotional arc. It starts simply, with Thom Yorke singing softly over a strummed acoustic guitar. The musical texture builds with each verse, adding by degrees bass, cello, electric [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]