Ah, yes … it was July 17, 2003—the only time I ever saw, or will see, R.E.M. perform live. Though I felt like I’d already seen them: the concert documentary, Road Movie, collapses three nights of performances at The Omni in Atlanta in November 1995, and I’d made a pretty obsessive study of that VHS [...]
Nothing like a favorite band calling it quits to rouse a blogger out of his stupor. I’ll try to capture some thoughts, over the next few days, regarding R.E.M.’s announcement yesterday that they’re throwing in the towel. I don’t have what I think of as the “Woodstock” story to tell about R.E.M. I wasn’t at [...]
More troubling, aesthetic hating seems, according to a logic that eludes me, to beget personal hating. Comments on the “Friday” YouTube page resemble a kind of gang violence, which is being perpetrated against a 13-year-old girl: I could just about forgive the mind numbing lyrics, god awfull video and the dull ass music, if she [...]
[Sorry for the delay: Part 2 today, finishing up on Monday.--KD] In retrospect, I think “Chocolate Rain” marked the start of something: It would be much tougher to say the start of exactly what. But apparently “Chocolate Rain” was popular because it’s terrible. On or around April 22, 2007, we started watching video, and listening [...]
Back in May, I published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that I really loved. But it coincided both with end-of-term and with the summer hibernation of fcrp, and so was sort of forgotten on this space. So today and the next two days, I reprint it here for your reading pleasure, and/or vehement [...]
We needn’t sit helpless in front of the TV, of course; one of the great debates in cultural studies over the past couple decades has been waged over the notion that consumers of mass media might have access to real agency, real power. There are a couple of steps in becoming a self-conscious media consumer-cum-producer, [...]
So I don’t want to pursue the allegorical reading of the novel this evening, as easy and as tempting that is. I want to look at a related question—the novel’s enactment of various narrative strategies that are meant to suggest, precisely, the power of narrative. Throughout the course of the novel, Ishiguro demonstrates the power [...]
I had the pleasure on Sunday night to address the incoming Pomona first-year students on the topic of the first-year reading: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I thought I’d post those remarks here, broken down across a few days into easily digestible installments. Two things I should probably say before diving in. First, I don’t [...]
Some decisions are just common sense: I don’t friend the kids of friendz, nor the friendz of my own kids. Rule of thumb: as a middle-aged man, never send a friend request to one of your daughter’s girlfriends. Or boyfriends, for that matter. It’s just creepy. And as a teacher, I don’t friend my students. [...]
Last time on this space, I was writing about the somewhat surreal experience of reading through my Facebook Friendz recommendations, carefully. Some things just aren’t meant to be read carefully: Paul Ryan’s Republican budget proposal, for instance; FB Friendz recommendations. That notwithstanding—I did. And, of course, I took a pass on nearly all of them. [...]