Friday Night I Crashed Your Party: Pop Culture Round-Up
Read
“Some ‘Girls’ Are Better Than Others.” Heather Havrilesky. New York Times.
Hannah, like so many women walking the line between the coddling of girlhood and the realities of adulthood, doesn’t hoot or cackle or tell it like it is. Most young women, even if they’re assertive and determined, still find themselves, in those forlorn in-between years, apologizing for themselves, blurting some muddled, half-finished thought and, finally, resolving to take up less space.
“The Unsinkable Heart of Titanic: 15 Years After Titanic, Does the Power Ballad Go On?” Ann Powers. NPR.
What’s changed is what we expect of an individual performer, comparable to the culture’s reduced interest in singular stories. Our hyperlinked lives, dominated by the need to constantly respond to new information through social media, mobile technology and ubiquitous advertising, branding, news feeds and other media onslaughts, work against the old-fashioned absorbing experience of the blockbuster. Some will find this a relief. Others will mourn its loss. It’s hard to sit in a theater for three-plus hours now and not check your text messages. (iPhone screens flashed all around me when I went to see Titanic.) And it can feel wrong, somehow, to give in to one strong voice determined to wipe away all others, even for only a few minutes.
“Jack White: Blunderbuss - review.” Alexis Petridis. The Guardian.
The red herring of the White Stripesish single Sixteen Saltines aside, Blunderbuss is a 45-minute double-take, one long “hang on a minute”. But then so, you could argue, is Jack White’s career. “People around me … want me the same,” he laments on On and On and On, which seems wide of the mark. If people mourned the White Stripes’ passing, it might have less to do with a passion for the familiar than a sense that the strange, contradictory, unfathomable figure White cut as half of that duo was more interesting than the straightforward powerpop or 70s blues-rock musician he appears to be in the Raconteurs or the Dead Weather.
“The Forty-Year Itch.” Adam Gopnik. The New Yorker.
What drives the cycle isn’t, in the first instance, the people watching and listening; it’s the producers who help create and nurture the preferred past and then push their work on the audience. Though pop culture is most often performed by the young, the directors and programmers and gatekeepers—the suits who control and create its conditions, who make the calls and choose the players—are, and always have been, largely forty-somethings, and the four-decade interval brings us to a period just before the forty-something was born. Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories.
Stream
Norah Jones’ new LP, Little Broken Hearts. (NPR.)
“Night and Day” - Hot Chip.
Watch
“Warm Ridin’.” Diarrhea Planet.
Girls - Pilot Episode. HBO via Youtube.
Plan
Official list of Record Store Day releases.
Nashville Film Festival schedule.
Celebrate
