For reasons that will probably be clear in retrospect, I have begun listening to the Doors again recently, especially their final album. The popular wisdom has it that L.A. Woman, despite having the worst of all the band’s album covers, was a powerful comeback that ranks among their best. Which, considering they only had six,… Read More The Lord is a New Creature – On Jim Morrison’s Poetry
The most recent Shallow & Pedantic Podcast was a two-parter on The Eye of Argon, famously the Worst Fantasy Story of All Time. We read the story, and we talked about it. In the first part, we laughed long and loudly at the madness of the story, its logorrheac prose combined with its dearth of… Read More Poking the Eye of Argon
If you watch Breaking Bad on Netflix, you will not notice that the show’s final season was bifurcated. But if you watched it at the time, you had to wait almost an entire year between the first and second half of that season. The first half ends with Hank Schrader discovering that Walter White is… Read More One’s Self I Sing – Breaking Bad and Freedom
I subscribe to 32 Poems, which is put out semi-annually. It contains, as promised, 32 poems per issue. They are thematically curated; the Spring/Summer 2022 issue features “32 Stages of American Hunger”. It’s that sort of thing. In said issue, I read a piece I found provocative: Agnes said that painting is not about ideas… Read More On Art and Freedom
Every right-thinking person should deplore Rolling Stone magazine for being a glossy nostalgia rag and corporate liberalism enabler. But every now and again one may gaze into the void and find insights. Imagine record sleeves without the advent of Hipgnosis, the photo-design company responsible for Pink Floyd‘s mysterious black prism, Led Zeppelin‘sflaxen-haired nudist children, AC/DC‘s censored everyday villains, Black… Read More Hipgnosis, and the Great Age of Album Covers
Last night I sat through a YouTube video nearly as long as a feature-length film, discussing a cartoon cat I haven’t cared about in decades. When I was a young fellow, I had a whole slew of Garfield books, at least the first 14 or so. Adolescence brought changes, and the existence of Calvin &… Read More Garfield and the Consumer Event Horizon
I don’t mean to be a Tolkien fanboy here, but I am tired of Twitter dorks with shallow intellects and electronic-addled minds pretending that they have anything useful to say. To be fair, Tolkien’s influence on the genre can be a touch overrated, and can lead to people ignoring other seminal writers. I myself only… Read More Everyone Who Says Fellowship of the Ring is Boring Should Go Back to Reading Books With Pictures
See how far you can get into their marketing gibberish before you give up. There’s so many things wrong with this. First of all, Robert Oppenheimer was not an heroic figure, however poetic his turn to the Baghavad-Gita was upon viewing what his science had wrought. He was a lab coat surrounded by lab coats.… Read More Christopher Nolan is Making a Movie About Robert Oppenheimer, and Variety Wants Me to Care
I deserve to be whipped for writing about this, as it’s fairly reeks of 2014, but I’ve seen it pop up on Twitter, and recently. Most of the time this is discussed in typical internet gibberish, but within it is an attempt to analyze human behavior, so there’s something worth commenting on. If you’re not… Read More Star Wars and the Social-Sexual Hierarchy
The Boys at RLM Recently did one of their “list” re:View episodes, about the films of John Carpenter. Let the record state that I’m not the biggest fan of this particular format. re:View works best as an opportunity to dust off an old/forgotten piece of cinema, turn it over backwards and front and make a… Read More Aesthetics vs. Prophecy: John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A.
Content Blues 