The number nine seems to be highly regarded in our culture. For instance, when we “dress to the nines” we mean we are dressed immaculately, ...

Simon Frith has observed that music “is more like clothes than any other art form” ( Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music , 1996)...

Some may remember puppeteer Shari Lewis’s children’s show, Lamb Chop’s Play-Along , that aired on PBS from 1992-97. At the end of the show, ...

In pre-literate, oral civilizations, people experienced their thoughts not as coming from within themselves, but from outside, as Spirit. A ...

In Douglas Sirk’s grand melodrama Written on the Wind (1956), the river represents a sort of lost innocence, a past happiness (however ill...

Last night I watched Ron Mann’s documentary Grass (1999), not so much a social history of marijuana in the United States as an exploration ...

Legend has it that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims and took place at Plymouth Plantation in 1621. Americans memorial...

There is a long history of mixed couples in American literature and popular culture: Huck and Jim, Ishmael and Queequeg, Natty Bumppo and Ch...

From the other side of the mirror, the Other often intrudes: the heroine sees the werewolf reflected in her vanity mirror, the vampire betra...

“Fantasy is a place where it rains,” writes Italy Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Vintage, 1988). His use of “rain” is figura...

The German inventor Emile Berliner patented the Gramophone in 1887. Unlike Thomas Edison, Berliner eschewed recording onto cylinders, and in...

A siren , in Greek mythology, was an assemblage or portmanteau, part bird, part woman, and was both dangerous (a “siren” to this day warns o...

Fire — “If we go back far enough,” Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents , “we find that the first acts of civilization were the u...

Trains have figured prominently in the cinema since its inception—think of the Lumière brothers’ early film, Arrivée d’un train à Perrache ...

The musical box — a novelty toy that produces music mechanically. The crucial parts of a musical box are the cylinder and the comb. The cyl...

I’ve blogged in the past about the figure of Orpheus in popular music, but I’ve yet to explore how the music has employed the mythic hero or...

Raymond Williams observed in his classic, The Country and the City , “’Country’ and ‘city’ are very powerful words, and this is not surprisi...

There is a long tradition in the Western world of likening the effects of alcohol to the ecstatic frenzy of divine possession. Socrates like...

Etymologically, the word hunger derives from the Old English hungor , akin to the Old High German hungar , and is related to the Lithuanian...

The recent (April 15) ninety-seventh anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic reminded me of the many popular songs written about disasters...