Tag Archives: bbc
Tom Waits For No One
I’d heard about Tom Waits’ music for years before I picked up a copy of his Asylum anthology on vinyl. I was about 18 years old in my first year at Michigan State University. I’d read the book Written in My Soul: Conversations with Rock’s Great Songwriters by Bill Flanagan. The interview with Tom is [...]
Suburban Savior
One of the videos I posted to the blog last week somehow lead to my discovering this BBC rock doc featuring Boy George’s personal musicological tour of Britain’s 1970s music scene — the music of his teen years highlighting the bands and the tunes that influenced Culture Club in the 1980s. Here’s a bit about [...]
Love in London
Getting back to posting about this year’s observance of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I’m interested in another take on the season that announced the rise of the hippie. While the phrase Summer of Love conjures images of willowy hippy girls and long haired hippie dudes frolicking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate [...]
Finding Fountain
This year we celebrate the 130th birthday of artist and chess aficionado, Marcel Duchamp who was born on July 28, 1887. It’s also the 100th birthday of Duchamp’s infamous readymade sculpture, “Fountain” — a urinal that Duchamp signed and dated with the pseudonym “R Mutt 1917.” Duchamp submitted the work to show in the April [...]
Rerun Rand
I came across an interesting article earlier today. With the rise of Trump I thought the religious right and the Ayn Rand extremists in the Republican party had been ousted. Unfortunately, the fake Christians seem as empowered as ever, and according to this piece, Ayn Rand has never held more sway over D.C….Here’s the word [...]
Shock Now
Following John Berger’s January death there’s been a resurgence of interest in his 1972 BBC television series Ways of Seeing. The series addresses the various modes of representation that Berger observed in visual art along with an exploration of what I would call the psychology of observation. It’s deep, interesting stuff, and even rather revolutionary [...]
Not Sham Rock
Lately I post a From The Archives selection to my social media on Fridays, but this Friday is St. Patrick’s Day and I wanted to share this great doc about Irish rock music. I originally discovered the BBC gem The Irish Rock Story: A Tale of Two Cities at the Nashville Public Library. It’s a [...]
Bye Bye, Berger
Art critic, novelist, painter and poet John Berger died on Monday. Berger celebrated his 90th birthday last year and a BBC special and a very good documentary film marked the occasion. Here’s some of my Burnaway review for The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger. It’s followed by a YouTube playlist I made [...]
Marvel Magus
I’m not fanatical about comic books, but I’ve always enjoyed graphic stories of all kinds, and I’ve been impressed by much of Marvel’s screen universe especially the brooding Captain America: Winter Soldier, and Daredevil‘s first season on Netflix. I recently attended a preview for Doctor Strange and it’s got much to recommend to readers of [...]
Anderson vs Burroughs
Performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson was one of the only women inside of William Burrough’s clique of friends and collaborators during the 1970′s, while some critics were pointing to what they saw as misogyny in Burrougs’ writings and statements to the press, women like Anderson and punk priestess Patti Smith befriended WSB, and were [...]
