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 [...]
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. [...]
It’s been so long since I posted, I hardly remember how. If John Lennon were still with us, I think he’d say that blog silence is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans. But at lunch today with a friend, I told a story that I realized might be of interest to [...]
I’m foolish, suppose, for letting it get to me. One Peter Wood had a piece in Wednesday’s Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Lily Bart vs. Lady Gaga.” The title should have been warning enough. For if you were innocently to ask, “Who’s Lily Bart?”, you would thereby have proven Wood’s point for him before he’d [...]
Yesterday, I pleaded for two more days to finish talking about Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” video—but I’m going to finish up here today instead. The second visual plot within the first section of the “Bad Romance” video concerns what I call “Sailor Moon Gaga,” who is wrest from her bathtub by Russian supermodel kidnappers (while [...]
Lady Gaga’s got nothing very new going on right now: a new, eagerly awaited album in the can, of course, but for now, a temporary lull in her frentetic output. And during that lull, I was asked by a student group on campus to address the question: “What, if anything, is new about Lady Gaga’s presentation of [...]
As Robyn and I were making our way through security at LAX yesterday morning, a large advertising poster loomed over us. Not a bad spot for an ad: a captive audience, certainly, if not an entirely festive one. For the time it took us to remove our shoes, empty our pockets, put our laptops and [...]