This week, I will be celebrating my one-year anniversary of this blog, by taking a look back over some highlights (at least, as far as I’m concerned). If we go all the way back to the beginning, I ran this site some years back, but let it go in the Fall of 2000. In fact, the last thing I wrote was something about the Vice Presidential debate between Lieberman and Cheney, focusing on their attacks on the entertainment industry. This site twisted in the wind until July 11, 2005, when it was re-launched in its current form.
Traffic has been building slowly, but steadily. Some of you haven’t read posts I’m still quite fond of, so I’m going to highlight a few.
Let’s start off with some MP3s. I think I’ve put up a lot of great songs, and I’ve tried to be wide-ranging in my efforts, but there’s one that kind of sticks out in my mind. Booze and broads and blunts and bitches was early in the game, only a few weeks into my effort. You’ve got Sinatra, which is always good (I posted one other song by him and I need to do more). Then you’ve go the issue of indie bands doing cover versions, which I discussed in more detail here. Then, there is element of the Enemies of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which was visited again here and here.
I welcome letters from readers, particularly when you have a vexing question. I’ve only gotten a few, but I’d like to encourage more. I answered questions about how to look cool in a vinyl DJ record store, worthwhile Podcasts and a query about Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 album In the Aeroplane over the Sea.
I’ve also tried to take photos on my travels, to bring you my own low-rent version of National Geographic. There was a load of bric-a-brac from the South, a report on gold teeth in Atlanta, a very confident car dealer in Savannah, and my recent trip to the Jersey Shore.
A correspondent brought back photos from Amsterdam, which I neatly tied back into Pulp Fiction, with one on fries and one on “coffee bars,” plus a funky street mime. Got any cool photos from your neck of the woods? Send ‘em in!
I write very little about art, but I was pleased at the way a post on American Gothic and one on Olympia both addressed the issue of whether any work of art — whether music or film or fiction — is supposed to have an opinion on the things it presents or whether it can report without judging. Some people assume that to present negative behavior without condemnation is a form of approval.
More to come…
UPDATE: Just to make it easier for you to download these:
DJ Cappell – Nasty Boy / For Every Man There’s a Woman
Barnabys – One More For My Baby
Tags: Frank Sinatra, DJ Cappel & Smitty, Blue Eyes Meets Bed-Stuy, Barnabys, MP3, Quentin Tarantino, Amsterdam, Grant Wood, American Gothic, Édouard Manet, Olympia
2 Responses
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djbangbanger Says:
hey man…………nice stuff. this my mp3 blog. check it out n can u add my blog link to urs?
4musiclovers.blogspot.com -
The Pop View Says:
An example has appeared that allows me to amplify the point made above about whether art is supposed to have an opinion about the things it represents. I refer you to this Slate piece on how The Searchers is actually a bad movie.
I would disagree for aesthetic reasons, but there is something more fundamental here.
James Wolcott has identified a type of pundit that he labeled “counterintuitives” — the guy who wants to stake out a contrary position just to be different. And attacking a supposed “classic” film is a great way to do that.
Stephen Metcalf seems really upset by Ethan Edwards (John Wayne’s character). Ethan’s racism seems to really offend Metcalf, even though it’s kind of the point of the film. And he also seemed offended by the fact that the film comes from another time and point-of-view.
Though visually magnificent, the movie is otherwise off-putting to the contemporary sensibility, what with its when men were men, and women were hysterics mythos and an acting style that often appears frozen in tintype.
Metcalf seems very troubled by what The Searchers says. There are characters and they act a certain way and the problem is… I don’t know. Is he bothered because racism is shown at all? Is it because it’s so raw and crude? Does he dislike it because it’s not contemporary?
I am prepared to accept that The Searchers might not be as good as I think it is. But I read the essay and I found no compelling argument. He says it’s an “excruciating necessity;” it’s “fidgeted-together,” an “obviously flawed” film. But he doesn’t say why. And he spends a lot of time on the ambiguity of Ethan not killing Debbie at the end, all to no real purpose.