I first became aware of the weirdo Liverpool band Clinic when my oldest daughter Emily bought me their 2002 album, Walking with Thee; I loved it almost immediately, and love it still. I haven’t kept up with their work in the interim, but they’ve got a new album, Bubblegum, scheduled for release on October 5—almost [...]
I closed yesterday on the dispute between the arbiters of literary meaning (the South Park establishment) and the creators of literary nonsense: Kyle, Kenny, Stan & Eric. (And nonsensical obscenity isn’t the worst of their crimes: the closing sentences of The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs, which we hear when read aloud by Kyle’s vomit-splattered father [...]
O.K., look: So I’m now officially sick of this South Park episode, while still admiring its intelligence and dexterity. Let’s finish saying what must be said before we drain all the life from it through our analysis—”paralysis by analysis,” as the old saw has it. Which is, coincidentally!, in large part what the episode itself [...]
[With apologies for the delayed posting of today’s blog. . . .] For simplicity’s sake, I’ve tried to organize today’s follow up about the South Park episode “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs” according to a handful of its most prominent themes, which I announced at the end of yesterday’s post. First, of course, censorship. Once [...]
With the spring semester now but a fond memory, I’m finally catching up on some of my homework. I think I’ve mentioned here that I taught a senior seminar called “Irony in the Public Sphere”; we were interested, mainly, in the sometimes spectacular ways that very compelling and intelligent ironic projects can misfire when they [...]
I dropped the story of Ice-T and “Cop Killer” midway on Thursday, in deference to our regular Friday feature, Mystery Science Auditorium; let’s finish up that story now. The song was “greeted” with predictable, and not altogether unreasonable, outrage. Tipper Gore went after Body Count in The Washington Post, comparing Ice-T’s message to “Hitler’s anti-Semitism [...]
With real regret I bid farewell Tuesday to my senior seminar students in “Irony in the Public Sphere.” They were a great class; the topic as I conceived it is a big, baggy one (which goes some way to explaining why the book is taking me so long to finish), and the students took my [...]
Those headphones on our students bother teachers because they seem to symbolize a voluntary deafness and a concomitant isolation. Allan Bloom put it most memorably, if artlessly, when he complained in The Closing of the American Mind that “as long as they [our students] have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition [...]