The late Robin Wood’s Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia UP, 1986) contains what I believe to be an extremely valuable discussion ...

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 ...

As Ted Gioia observes in The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (1988), in the early years of jazz studies, the first im...

For some reason, after a couple of years of existence, my blog is now being targeted for random comments from a location (or locations) over...

About three weeks ago, I wrote a short blog entry on the famous cynic Diogenes, the great anti-Socratic. Diogenes was greatly admired by Al...

In Chapter 2 (“The Rise of Individualism and the Jazz Solo”) of James Lincoln Collier’s book, Jazz: The American Theme Song (1993), Collier...

Friedrich Kittler ( Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , 1999) argues that from around 1880 on, composers of music have been “allied with engineer...

The long-playing (“LP”) microgroove record, what is commonly referred to as the vinyl LP, which in its final form held about 20 minutes of m...

Historian David Morton indicates in Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (2000) that the first signific...

There’s an old saw that avers suffering transforms the common man into a philosopher, and this may express a certain truth. In one of her po...

According to John Tobler’s This Day In Rock (Carroll & Graf, 1993), Led Zeppelin’s first album (cover pictured) was released 41 years a...

The soundtrack to the film Pretty Woman (1990) contains Christopher Otcasek’s cover version of Johnny O’Keefe’s 1958 hit, “The Wild One” in...