Wednesday, January 25 2012
Circling the Sun Machine: Re-thinking David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’
Bowie's odd magnetism has long been interpreted as a function of his ambiguous sexuality, but could it be that he was transgressing more than just gender norms and heralding the rise of the man/machine?
Wednesday, September 21 2011
Still Pulling Your Strings: ‘Master of Puppets’ 25 Years Later
Master of Puppets not only rocketed Metallica into stardom upon its 1986 release, but it also blew a hole in the industry’s unwritten rule that a band without commercial aspirations could not make it and, as a result, helped undermine music censorship.
Tuesday, August 30 2011
Run Red Run: Funny Song, Serious Message
The Coasters aren't thought of as particularly revolutionary, yet a single they released in 1959 was the first pop record to challenge the racism of post-World War II America.
Tuesday, August 23 2011
Last Stop But One: The Final Musical Act of Rhythm and Blues Singer Little Willie John
Little Willie John was one of the first and greatest R&B singers of all time. So why have so few people ever heard of him?
Monday, July 18 2011
An Honorable Escape: Georgette Heyer Remakes Jane Austen
Repetition -- of plots, characters, editions -- is not a disadvantage in romance book publishing industry. It's the very reason for being, though it must be carefully managed to prevent satiety.
Wednesday, July 13 2011
Batman’s Cultural Impact: Promoting Great Society Values
The Batman TV series (1966-1968) is famous for its witty camp humor and colorful cast of villains. But, argues Chris Gould, it also enthusiastically espoused the social and political goals of LBJ and the Great Society.
Tuesday, June 7 2011
Harlem Nights: Eddie Murphy and the Original Gangsters of Black Comedy
After a decade of uninterrupted success, Eddie Murphy ushered out the 1980s with an ambitious but shaky vanity project. Here is how the director, producer, writer and star of Harlem Nights bit off more than he could reasonably chew.
Tuesday, October 5 2010
Less Than Zero’s Julian Problem
Cocaine-fueled despair, oversaturated sex in blues and purples, desolate teenagers dying in the dust -- this was the feel-bad movie of the '80s, an open sore on the era’s facade of flawlessness.
Friday, September 17 2010
Can You Imagine Standing in Line Just for a Newspaper?
'Suddenly and with little warning: STRIKE!' So began a 17-day newspaper delivery strike that prevented newspapers from getting to newsstands and doorsteps, as immortalised in the 1945 short, 17 Days: The Story of Newspaper History in the Making.
Thursday, September 16 2010
Time Capsule of Our Culture: 1968’s ‘Hawaii Five-O’
When Alex O’Loughlin becomes Steve McGarrett on September 20, 2010, he ushers in Hawaii Five-O for a new generation and a new millennium. The re-imagined series will be viewed and critically reviewed on its own merits, but it can’t escape the original’s place in pop culture.
Friday, September 3 2010
The Shock Heard ‘Round the World: ‘Bitches Brew’ Turns 40
For a lot of the critics with whom this work never registered, Bitches Brew signified the first time a butterfly turned back into a caterpillar. In actuality, the moves Miles made as the ‘70s began seem, with the benefit of hindsight, like magnetic fields pulling him into the future -- and taking music with him.
Sunday, July 25 2010
The Stories In ‘Acts of Worship’ Feel Like Practice Runs for Better Things to Come
This is an erratic arrangement of tales that merely offers glimpses into Yukio Mishima’s later greatness as a novelist.
Thursday, July 22 2010
In ‘House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories’, Dreams and Reality Seduce and Intertwine
These tales are a must read for anyone who enjoys the short fiction form, and if looking for an introduction to Japanese literature, The House of Sleeping Beauties is a good place to begin.
Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, and the Narratives of American Popular Song
It is now possible to see Bing Crosby’s success not as a prior model against which Elvis Presley would assert himself, but rather, as a template that Elvis would adapt and exploit.
Sunday, July 18 2010
Change Can’t Come Fast Enough Within ‘The Waiting Years’
It's difficult for any culture to accept change, and after reading The Waiting Years, readers will see just what this culture, and its women, especially, were waiting for.
Wednesday, June 30 2010
Junichiro Tanizaki’s ‘Naomi’ Than Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’
Naomi is often called Tanizaki’s “first important novel”, because not only is the psychology behind sexual obsession uncovered, but it also exposes the contradictions of the culture during that time.
Wednesday, June 23 2010
Beauty and Sadness Proves That With Beauty Comes Power
At a lean 206 pages, much psychological intensity and artistic craft are set within, and universal themes like love, jealousy, revenge and manipulation are all handled with subtlety and beauty.
Friday, June 18 2010
Pete Seeger… Un Hombre Sincero
These two documents transport listeners and viewers back to the heart of the civil rights era and reaffirm Seeger's creation of a truly global music of conscience that can transcend the limitations of its local translations.
Monday, October 5 2009
The Ska Will Go On
Ska never died... it merely sank back underground to the grimy clubs from whence it sprang, while the genre’s biggest stars took time to rest, regroup, and strategize their comebacks.
Tuesday, April 21 2009
Dirty Harry: Nothing Wrong with Shooting the Right People
The year Dirty Harry was released (1971) saw several demonstrations of angry cops questioning why criminals had very solid constitutional protections that often interfered with law enforcement work.
Thursday, April 16 2009
Monotrematous Funk: An Interview with Platypus
How did a progressive rock-funk band from Dayton, Ohio become label mates with KISS and Donna Summer? 30 years later, the members of Platypus tell the story.
Wednesday, April 15 2009
M Squad: Clench-jawed and World-weary
Lee Marvin almost floats through his space, bending his graying hatchet-head forward on his tall lanky body, his loose limbs on the point of uncoiling into savagery when some mug pulls a rod or throws a punch. He's a dangerous gentleman.
Thursday, April 2 2009
The Aesthetics of Absorption: Truffaut’s ‘The 400 Blows’
In Truffaut, the camera works not to keep the viewer out of the constructed reality of the film but rather to draw the viewer into the artifice, to make the viewer complicit in its feigned reality
Friday, March 20 2009
Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer): One More Time with the King of Western Swing
Today, many performers play a revivalist form of Western Swing, but even more may be tipping a hat to Bob Wills without even knowing it. Chomping down on his cigar, Wills and his legacy strut around the stage of musical history, rarely taking the lead but now and then giving a holler of approval.
Thursday, March 19 2009
An Auteur’s Touch of Evil
The auteur is dead, long live the auteur: Orson Welles and Touch of Evil, 50 years on.
Monday, December 15 2008
Bettie Page, Dead Since 1957
What might be remembered of the life of a woman who was long ago replaced by her own representation?
Friday, October 17 2008
Honoré de Balzac: A Man of Enormous Appetites
One has to wonder, having conquered two duchesses before reaching his 25th birthday, if Honoré de Balzac didn't believe he deserved the aristocratic title in his name more than some who'd come by it more honestly.
Monday, September 15 2008
Jokerman Meets Mad Man
Bob Dylan helped change the way the 1960s sounded; advertising icon George Lois changed the way it looked. It's only fitting that their paths have crossed several times since
Friday, August 29 2008
The Invaders: Cold War Central with the Vietnam Blues
The aliens carry silver dollars with lights which function both as cell phones and as gadgets that can make anyone drop dead from an instantly diagnosable "brain hemorrhage".
Friday, June 6 2008
Adah Isaacs Menken: The First Broadway Star
A predecessor to virtually all stage and screen sirens, Menken thumbed her nose at the Victorian fetish for decorum that deformed the female figure, and celebrated her body electric, firm and active before being wasted from typhus or riddled by bullets.
Monday, December 3 2007
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Berlin Alexanderplatz, both serial film and novel, are essential to knowing Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
