George Case's Blog, page 10

The most refreshing aspect of Jack Hamilton’s 2016 book, Just Around Midnight:  Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, is that it doesn’t rehearse the familiar history of popular music as a long sequence of white artists ripping off Black ones for fun and profit.  Instead Hamilton is more interested in the history of popular […]

This week marks the 57th anniversary of Time magazine’s famous cover story, “Is God Dead?” Today, as newspapers and magazines struggle for readership and relevance, it’s hard to imagine how a weekly print journal could much affect popular sentiment, but in April 1966 Time was virtually an arbiter of middlebrow American opinion and morals.   […]

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) is one of the most important and influential filmmakers of all time.  For generations of movie buffs and aspiring cineastes, he was a model of visual innovation and creative autonomy, and it was Kubrick, before anyone else, who came to embody the popular conception of what a movie director should be.  If […]

Pussycat’s Nine Lives Used Up – Josie Jones, leader of the iconic Pussycats band whose songs became anthems of a generation, was shot and killed by a deranged fan outside her New York City apartment yesterday.  Jones, known for her ears, tail, and uniquely rectangular fretless and stringless guitar, was the author of the Pussycats’ […]

“If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention,” has been a common refrain from the political fringe for many years.  These days it’s not even confined to the fringe:  believers in the deep state, in QAnon, and in Satanic pedophile rings have formed a crucial bloc of the electorate in the United States and elsewhere […]

It’s been a while since I hung out in a musical instrument shop, but I still flip through the latest issues of Guitar World, Guitar Player, and Guitar Aficionado when I find them on the newsstand, and I still feel a shiver of lust looking at what can only be described as guitar porn.  If […]

My oddest experience with Freedom to Read Week, the annual anti-censorship campaign observed in Canada from February 19 to February 25 this year, came during my stint in a Vancouver book shop.  I was enlisted to collect a stack of titles to put in the storefront display along with a poster and other bumf announcing […]

Since I began blogging, I’ve been reminded of the argument that I am now part of a planetary consciousness that represents the next stage in human development.  Indeed, the internet as a whole, it’s said, fulfils the visions of the Jesuit philosopher Pierre de Teilhard de Chardin, who foretold the coming of an oceanic global […]

Like any famous musical act, the Beatles have often been imitated.  Whether done out of opportunism, admiration, or parody (or a combination thereof), the imitations help us recognize the unique elements of the original – the qualities which, when demonstrated by other acts, are instantly found to be “Beatlesque.”  Two- or three-part vocal harmonies, chiming […]

 Tragedy seldom stands alone.  Shocking news, such as the allegations of mass unmarked graves on the sites of former Native residential schools, is not only horrific in itself, but is soon made a symbol of broader, ongoing horror.  “The shootings in Atlanta were horrible, but they didn’t come to me as a surprise,” wrote journalist […]