When I think of the murder of John Lennon—murder, assassination?—the picture in my mind’s eye is of his iconic eyeglasses, lying at some distance from his body, on the sidewalk outside the Dakota. I’ve never seen such a picture; to the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t exist, unless inside some sealed NYPD or FBI [...]
The Beatles broke up when I was in sixth grade; I remember a kid named Hugh—can’t remember his last name now, forty years on—came to school one day, crying, with the news. I remember, too, that it meant next to nothing to me: an oldest child can languish behind the curve when it comes to [...]
I’ve been vowing for a very long time to return to the harmonica. My only instrumental training as a child was keyboard lessons as a teenager; my mother won a Kimball organ on the Hollywood Squares (seriously), and for a couple of years I took lessons from a guy who, after he left our house, went [...]
So after the tough sledding of the past few days, it’s time for us all to frolic a bit in the shallow end of the cultural pool: it is, after all, still summer, and Labor Day’s just around the corner. Here, then, a parlor game: What are your ten favorite “rock movies”? That phrase wobbles [...]
[Today's post comes to us courtesy of my old college roomate Steve Long, President of Aspen Ridge Capital Management. We met almost immediately as freshmen at UC Davis and enjoyed/endured one another's music over the duration of our undergraduate years.] I’ve theorized with Kevin that a blog posting (of his) that’s too deeply and carefully [...]
More significant, perhaps, is the fact that much of the communal activity of rock-music consumption has been driven underground. Given the copyright maximalism of legislation like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the hyperactive enforcement regime of the Recording Industry Association of America—whose prosecutorial zeal against college students since January 2003 has been [...]
I’ve not to this point followed the Adam Lambert saga closely, though the sophisticated and erudite readers of fakechineserubberplant will, I think, know the general outlines of his story: a finalist in the eighth season of American Idol, Lambert’s chances to win seemed to evaporate precisely at the moment that pictures of him making out [...]