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On History and the Elephant
The conservative-leaning National Association of Scholars has issued a new report expressing dismay about the state of U.S. history instruction in Texas state schools, and by extension, the American...
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Tortoise, Standards
I recently pulled out one of my favorite pieces of vinyl, one of the few records that I bought new rather than used: Tortoise’s Standards. Released in 2001, twelve years ago this month actually, the...
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On Film Narrative and Terror
Our household just got back from a long weekend in 1999. We listened to Fiona Apple’s second album and prepared our computers for Y2K. We also watched Fight Club and The Matrix. Having only seen them...
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Faulkner’s “The Wishing Tree”
I’m gonna jump-start Tom’s weekly culture post here, getting Friday rolling with some beautiful, rarely seen pen-and-inks. A few days ago, my sweetie found some cool book reviews of little-known...
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On Creativity, Appropriation, and Theft
Last night I was listening to Merle Haggard and the Strangers while doing the dishes when I heard something that made laugh out loud. The last 10 seconds of “If We Make It Through December” (1973) has...
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On Creativity (part 2)
Over the years, I’ve read a lot of artists comment on the ways audiences or fans ask them the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” A powerful query, and something many would-be artists would like...
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Selma and Voting Rights
I just wanted to make a quick note about last week’s memorial and reenactment of the Forty-eighth Anniversary of Selma, Alabama’s “Bloody Sunday.” As most of our readers know, “Bloody Sunday” took...
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On Creativty (Part 3)
All right, this is Part 3. Since posting Part 2, my thinking on this has been derailed by a conversation about the spiritual and transcendent aspects of creativity. I began my premise to de-mystify...
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On the Harlem Shake and Authenticity
Prior to watching Melissa Harris-Perry’s breakdown of the “Harlem Shake,” I hadn’t seen any of the virals. But I am struck by Harris-Perry’s account of cultural appropriation and racial/geographical...
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Enjoying Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Travels
I suppose this post will be redundant, because I simply want to call attention to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s beautiful series of blog entries about his first trip to France–his first trip out of the U.S.–and...
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Fugazi, Repeater
“There are no more races to be run, there are not numbers left to be won. Everybody’s down, we pulled each other down. There never was a truth to be found. We are all bigots, so full of hatred, we...
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“Can You Get to That”
If anybody needs cheering up this morning, tomorrow, or anytime this lifetime, I sincerely recommend you check out one of the greatest songs of the twentieth century performed by one of the greatest...
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The GOP Doesn’t Get “Identity Politics”
Over the past few months, I’ve been routinely shocked by the GOP’s seemingly desperate search for an African American figurehead. It seems crazy, superficial, and, yes, racist to assume that blacks...
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Record Store Day!
Pull the earbuds outta your head and go find a record store near-by. Though they dwindle, most towns still have ‘em, and today they’re waiting for you with cool new music (some in limited quantities,...
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Evaluating Value
I was thinking about cultural value this morning, as I have all week (all month, really…actually, for the past year, I guess). I’m interested in the overlap between the hard economic value of cultural...
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The Value of Pop (slight return)
Yesterday, I tried to make sense of the relationship between various forms of “value” and popular culture. I should have known not to bring up the internet and, especially, not to have tried too hard...
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On Trial by Ordeal, Obama, and Game of Thrones
In a recent New Yorker article (March 18, 2013), historian Jill Lepore outlines a concise genealogy of state torture and capital punishment. Lepore begins with Attorney General John Ashcroft’s shock...
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The NY Times Doesn’t Get Structural Racism
Sometime in the mid-1990s, the head of the National Black Farmers Association, John W. Boyd, Jr., went to his local branch of the Farm Service Administration’s loan office in Virginia, to try to...
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More on the Southern Fantastic
I’ve been thinking about Keith’s most recent post on the “Southern Fantastic”—the common and consistent mythification of the American South in film. Keith offers lots of good cinematic examples, and I...
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“Moral Mondays” in Raleigh
For the past five weeks, North Carolina citizens of all stripes have been protesting their state legislature, calling attention most specifically to a series of bills and agendas many critics contend...
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