Lana del Rey, Blues Hammer, and the Law of Interpretive Parsimony

“Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of [...]

Maybe in France: *A Town Called Panic*

Things that happen in the animated stop-action film A Town Called Panic, featuring lurching plastic toys prone to voluble shouting in French, available streaming on Netflix: For Horse’s birthday party, a little temporary bar is set up in the basement and everyone drinks too much.  Afterwards the policeman’s wife comments, “I should’ve charged more for [...]

Secret winter fairy house

Activity for an MLK day holiday afternoon (no service component here…). Materials mostly gathered on walk to park: sticks milkweed (or something) fluff seeds berries acorns one round box Tools: saw, hot glue gun. And here is the finished product, so far, the house of two fairy children and their pet mouse Rollo (made from [...]

Kendrick Lamar, “F*ck Your Ethnicity”

Another strange young (post-Black/ post-identitarian?) California (post-?) rapper (formerly K. Dot) self-releasing gorgeous, smart music. Great song– check out the pretty piano chords and synth throb. Has anyone in Ethnic Studies grappled with this one?  “Racism is still alive” — what exactly is he saying about that statement?  Is he saying it’s wrong?  Presumably not, [...]

Evil Santa: *Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale*

I had been looking forward for quite some time to seeing this strange-sounding Finnish film, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a sort of Finnish Santa Claus horror movie.  Very high-concept: evil Santa (one-upping Bad Santa).  Brief synopsis from Wikipedia: The film focuses on a group of local reindeer herders whose Christmas is disturbed by excavations [...]

Sister Arts/ Versatile Blogger

My blogging-professor comrade at Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Arts, Community has generously nominated me for a Versatile Blogger Award. Another English-professor blog I always check is Moonraking, a series of ruminations on popular music, concerts, books, movies, and anything else Prof. Moonraking is thinking about.  These posts combine erudition with rock-critic brio.  Be warned:  following [...]

Lucking out/ real bitter? James Wolcott’s memoir

As a kind of followup to the Kael bio, I also read the James Wolcott memoir,  Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York.  I somehow did not realize that Wolcott (whom I associate with Vanity Fair) began his career and was generally known for years not only as a Village [...]