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, [...]
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 [...]
Martin Brennan isn’t really an “area man”: his company is based in the UK, and besides, I’m not aware that there’s a large community of “silicon-chip designers” here in the Inland Empire. I’ve just always liked the sound of that phrase. I’m sorry to have lured you in under false pretenses. (But then, false pretenses [...]
On January 25, not December 25, Gang of Four’s first new album in more than fifteen years, Content, is scheduled for release. I love what I’m assuming is the pun presented in the title: it’s hard to image G4 as either “content,” is in happy, or as content providers. Though (to ruin my conclusion) I’m [...]