Assay office   [from Wikipedia ]: “Institutions set up to assay (test the purity of) precious metals . . . . often done to protect consumers...

Several years ago, I published a blog post on songs that feature whistling. At the time, I wrote about the many significations of whistling...

How many critics—of the theater, movies, music, contemporary fine arts—wake up each morning with the uncomfortable feeling that someday they...

According to Wikipedia , there are well over a thousand cover versions of “Louie Louie.” Question: Given the many hundreds of versions av...

Search the web, and you’ll find various meanings attributed to “My huckleberry friend,” the penultimate line from Mancini and Mercer’s “Mo...

According to legend, after a successful preview of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), the then supervisory chief of production at Paramount, ...

The summer of 1967 became known as the “Summer of Love,” in effect an opportunity to market new fashions, rock music, and alternatives to...

An old adage warns never judge a book by its cover. What about an album cover? Music critic Michael Jarrett observes, “[album] covers n...

You don’t walk through life anymore. You run. You dance. You drive a car. You take a plane, not a train. Clothes must be able to move too...

Nancy Sinatra’s and Lee Hazlewood’s successful duets can be understood by yet another analogy to filmmaking. Greta Garbo made twenty-four...

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood (1929-2007) are to pop music what Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg are to the cinema: two differe...

I have been reading Judith Freeman’s excellent book, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Pantheon, 2007). I w...