“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...

Déclassé —To be demoted from a high status or rank to a lower one, especially in social status. The word déclassé is also applied to weapons...

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...

“In Fritz Lang’s M ,” writes Raymond Durgnat, “the child murderer (Peter Lorre) sees his next victim gazing into a shop window full of toys....

When I was growing up, Jacques Cousteau (1910-1997) was the most famous undersea explorer in the world. I knew about him primarily through h...

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

Although the origin of the word is contested, some suggest the word carnival is derived from the Latin carnem levare or the Italian carnel...

Among the vast repertoire of symbols available to the lyricists of popular music, one of the most frequently used is blindness. A famous use...

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...