During this happy Halloween season, let’s not forget Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and its doomed, hypersensitive prot...

The emergence of psychedelic rock in the late 60s was fueled by the same cultural interest in exotica that inspired the 50s exotica of Les B...

Sleeve —the protective cover in which a vinyl LP record is packaged and stored, normally with distinctive graphics. According to Michael Jar...

I’ve observed on this blog once or twice before that so-called progressive rock (or “art rock”) developed in order to assuage pop guilt. The...

Having mulled over the issue for the past couple of days, I’ve concluded that those collections of bad cover versions of pop songs performed...

The Picture of Dorian Gray —the picture acts as a “magic mirror” (as in the story of Snow White), absorbing Dorian Gray’s spiritual ugliness...

Vergeltungswaffen —German for “vengeance weapon,” as in V-2 rocket, a weapon of revenge, retribution, and reprisal. Prompted by the box-offi...

In the chapter of Tristes Tropiques entitled “A Little Glass of Rum,” Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that anthropology is born of remorse. In...

Flowers smack of sentimentality. They’ve become a cultural symbol upon which an entire economy thrives—the flower shop. “Say it with flowers...

A remarkable serendipity occurred this morning shortly after I posted my blog on dolls, mannequins, marionettes, dummies and other forms of ...

Do dolls have souls? “All children talk to their toys; the toys become actors in the great drama of life, scaled down inside the camera obsc...

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