Category: Pop Culture

Big G and Me

Culture / Family history / Film & Reviews / Godzilla / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Pop Culture / TV2 Comments

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One of my fondest childhood memories is sitting between my parents on a warm summer night, on the front seat of the family car, watching a movie through the windshield, above the dashboard. A single, metal-wrapped speaker hung from the glass of the half-opened window on the driver’s side. A box of salty popcorn passed between us, soft drinks too. Around us were dozens of other cars, all facing the giant outdoor screen, their occupants nothing more than dark shadows. Behind us was a low, concrete building with a screen-facing opening where we could buy snacks and drinks. It was ……… click below for more ↓

Kmise and Aklot ukuleles

Musical Instruments / Pop Culture / Ukulele: instruments & music2 Comments

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I was somewhat skeptical when a representative from Kmise ukuleles contacted me recently, and offered to send me some of his company’s instruments to review. I had never heard of the company and never seen any of their instruments in music stores. A bit of online searching showed them as a Chinese maker of modestly-priced instruments. Not just ukuleles, however: they offer a wider range of instruments and accessories (many are listed on Amazon), including singing bowls, harmonicas, kalimbas, u-bass, banjoleles, pickups, violin bows, effects pedals and more. (I plan to buy their U-bass to compare it to others I’ve ……… click below for more ↓

Baby, It’s Politically Correct Outside…

Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Culture / Memes; Internet & Social / Poetry & Lyrics / Political correctness gone wild / Political fads / Pop Culture / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

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I must have travelled to another universe because when I awoke, the world had gone mad. Radio stations were pulling a popular, rather over-played, 74-year-old, playful holiday song because some folks thought it was about rape. Sexual assault. Or at least non-consensual sex. The media was full of Chicken Littles screaming that the cultural sky was falling if radio stations continued to play it. The song was subject of weighty opinions on editorial pages. What is going on in this strange, politically correct and apparently unhinged universe? Let me back up. Two items appeared simultaneously on my Facebook timeline this week: ……… click below for more ↓

Astrology: millennials in search of woo hoo

Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pop Culture / Pseudoscience & QuackeryLeave a comment

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“Astrology is not a science; there’s no evidence that one’s zodiac sign actually correlates to personality.” I was disappointed to read that line in a story in The Atlantic, a piece titled, “The New Age of Astrology: In a stressful, data-driven era, many young people find comfort and insight in the zodiac—even if they don’t exactly believe in it.” Disappointed not because it isn’t true – it is: astrology is woo hoo – but rather that writers still feel the need to state the obvious. It’s like a movie reviewer starting with “There’s no evidence that Batman is actually a ……… click below for more ↓

The Mummy, the remake and the re-imagining

Culture / Film & Reviews / Pop CultureLeave a comment

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Nineteen thirty-two. The year Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, was published. The Great Depression was at its worst. Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover to become the American president in a landslide win. Gandhi went on a hunger strike. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Eighty-four-year-old Paul von Hindenburg was re-elected president in April, defeating Adolf Hitler. Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son was kidnapped from his New Jersey home. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the first scifi radio show was first aired. Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Fats Waller, ……… click below for more ↓

La Bohème at the Galaxy

Arts / Culture / Music & Reviews / Opera & Classical Music / Pop CultureLeave a comment

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Starving bohemian artists living in drafty Paris attics in the mid-19th century, struggling to produce their art, falling in and out of love, sharing and suffering, living and dying, all done while singing. That’s La Bohème in a nutshell. I am embarrassed, even ashamed to admit I’ve never been to the opera. Not to a live performance that is. For someone who has long enjoyed opera as music, and has a fair collection of opera on CD, that’s inexcusable.* I’ve seen a few of the “big” operas on video – I had Madame Butterfly on VHS and still have Boris ……… click below for more ↓

Fire and Fury reviewed

Books & Reviews / History & Biography / Politics / Pop Culture / Reading & Literacy / US Politics / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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Dysfunctional. Childish. Self-centred. Narcissistic. Ideologically myopic. Illiterate. Cranky. Capricious. Arrogant. Scheming. Petty. Ill-educated. No, I’m not writing about our local council (although, yes, all those words apply equally to The Block). These are some of the words that came to mind as I read Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Dysfunctional popped into my mind most often as Wolff described the lurching, staggering, fumbling and bumbling of Trump’s staff and family advisers after their unexpected – and for some unwanted – victory. (I know: curiously coincidental how that description also echoes our own council’s meandering, ……… click below for more ↓

Guillermo, monsters and me

Arts / Culture / Film & Reviews / Godzilla / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Pop CultureOne Comment

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Tucked away at the bottom of a tall display case in the ‘At Home With Monsters’ exhibit at the AGO is a small collection of seven old, well-thumbed books, all by the 19th century French naturalist and entomologist, Jean-Henri Fabre. At the very bottom of the pile, its title almost hidden in the shadows, is The Life of the Spider, first translated into English in 1913, but not translated again until 1971. The books subtly reflect the importance director and artist Guillermo del Toro places on insects in his works. He calls them “living metaphors” and adds, “They are so ……… click below for more ↓

Kong and his films

Culture / Film & Reviews / Godzilla / Media / Pop Culture4 Comments

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Kong: Skull Island is the 19th movie in my collection about apes.* Or at least ape-ish creatures (not including those about cave people or yetis). We watched the recently-released Kong: Skull Island this past weekend, even devouring all of the special features on the second disc. I give Kong: Skull Island second place in the great ape/Kong pantheon because it’s well done, fun, action-packed, and not nearly as bloated as Peter Jackson’s 2005 epic. Despite some lukewarm or critical reviews, it’s worth watching and collecting if your taste are in any way similar to mine. Films of this ilk are meant ……… click below for more ↓

The strange life of Bobby Fischer

Books & Reviews / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Pop Culture / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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Forty five years ago this month, a momentous event took place in Iceland that shook the world. After 21 games spread over almost two months, the eccentric American chess master, Bobby Fischer, ended 24 years of Soviet dominance in chess after beating Soviet grandmaster, Boris Spassky. It shook the world at the apex of the Cold War. I watched it unfold, a memory I will always  carry. Many years later, former Russian grandmaster, Garry Kasparov, commented, …in the Soviet Union, chess was treated by the Soviet authorities as a very important and useful ideological tool to demonstrate the intellectual superiority ……… click below for more ↓

As Elvis leaves the building, so do we all

Culture / Music & Reviews / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Pop CultureLeave a comment

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No one gets out of here alive. We all die. And with us go into the dustbin the dreams, the values, the ideals, the culture we grew up with, we shared, we ensconced in our daily existence. And the clutter we accumulated during our lives. Elvis has left the building and, sooner or later, so shall we all. And as we do, the value of our own material legacy will diminish with each day. A recent story in The Guardian tells of how once-treasured Elvis memorabilia is falling in value, as collectors age and die off, leaving a younger generation ……… click below for more ↓

The Bard’s Best? Nope…

Books & Reviews / Culture / Literature / Pop Culture / ShakespeareLeave a comment

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To help celebrate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death (April 23) and 452nd of his birth (also April 23), the website Mashable has put together a “battle” for the “Best Shakespeare Play Ever.” It’s done up as a sort of sports playoff grid (a tournament bracket), broken into four categories. Four? That’s right. Even though the First Folio was only divided into three categories, Mashable added their own: The plays are organized into four quadrants based on the four genres of plays Shakespeare commonly wrote: comedies, histories, tragedies and weird magic stuff. (Okay, we may have made up that last ……… click below for more ↓

Who By Fire

Books & Reviews / Culture / Literature / Poetry & Lyrics / Pop Culture / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQTRX23EMNk I’ve been reading a biography of Leonard Cohen, recently: the 2012 I’m Your Man, by Sylvie Simmons. It’s an interesting journey through the life and thoughts of an exquisite artist who is, by nature, somewhat reclusive and stays out of the spotlight, but is deeply dedicated to his art. I don’t normally read “star” bios or autobiographies – frankly they often seem contrived and the lives portrayed, no matter how gussied up in prose, merely shallow. Most of them I categorize as “who cares?” books. Even those musicians I respect and admire have little to keep me turning pages. I struggled with ……… click below for more ↓

Why I Still Watch M*A*S*H

Culture / Personal Reminiscences / Pop Culture / TVOne Comment

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The news of Harry Morgan’s death at 96, back in 2011, saddened me. I’m at the age when it seems far too many icons of my youth are dying off. Not from some misspent life or accident; from old age. And the process accelerates as I age. I now understand why my grandparents and then parents read the newspaper obituaries. I haven’t quite succumbed to that, but I’m sure the day will come. No, I’m not being morbid. Or maudlin. I have, I believe, a healthy attitude towards death. Death moves me, sometimes fascinates me (as our collective attitude towards it fascinates me), ……… click below for more ↓

Is This Your Bar of Soap?

Culture / Humour & Satire / Personal Reminiscences / Pop Culture2 Comments

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This is side five. Follow in your book and repeat after me as we learn three new words in Turkish: Towel. Bath. Border. So begins Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, from the first album released by the Firesign Theater, in 1968 (on later albums spelled as Theatre). Everything in it is a misdirection, a sidestep, a pun, an unexpected segue, a joke-within-a-joke, an opening to another place you hadn’t expected to be led to. May I see your passport please? Yes, I have it right here. (sounds of busy airport terminal in background) Uhum. Uhum. Uhum. Look at ……… click below for more ↓

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