i’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal-lobotomy: the cutting edge of neuro-surgery five decades hence, via the always marvellous Nag on the Lake
second hand rose: the life and times of a vintage wall-paper hunter
les diableries: nineteenth century stereoviews of Hell
hi-fi for the small fry: nursery rhymes and children’s folk songs set to the music of 1960s teen dance crazes
honourable mentions: as America declares itself first, more invitation videos vying for sloppy-seconds
tam-toss: a flash-mob tribute to Mary Tyler Moore from Minneapolis, via TYWKIWDBI
Friday 3 February 2017
6x6
Thursday 2 February 2017
bates motel
Wednesday 1 February 2017
mad libs or ready for prime-time
Writing for Kottke, Tim Carmody invites us to think broadly about the rhetoric television politics and how the different venues intersect and how the strategies of enabling agents wield their sophistry to blur, confuse and manipulate the normally distinct forums and platforms. Would that we could examine the quiver of the rhetorician academically with Lincoln-Douglas debate club stakes as it’s really a fascinating exercise that’s been debased to the regrettable but very necessary act of bullshit detecting and knowing when the weaker argument is made the stronger. Unfortunately, the ability to articulate how this is done is valued far less that the talent for making the specious or the deceptive believable. I wonder if Dear Leader’s majordomo is a better advisor and mouthpiece.
the pre-fab four
At a time when popular culture and entertainment in flush with reprisals and reboots, many of which are not deserving of our nostalgia and really defy explanation other than derivative vehicles for some marketing tie-in, it was refreshingly discordant to come across this appreciation of fifty years since the debut of the Monkees.
Like the narrator, I realised that I probably had not really spared a thought for the band for years until that moment but being confronted with the intimately familiar repertoire again, I found myself thinking that these numbers were actually really well performed and not just the floss that I had always dismissed them as. Maybe it was that TV show theme that haunted the group—who were originally conceived as a sitcom about an aspiring group of musicians to be like the Beatles—and how both arms of the franchise unfolded concominently, making the music literally incidental. No faulting the band for what they label expected them to do, but it’s strange how I was compelled to hold one opinion—with some conviction and made me think of the Berenstein/Berenstain phenomenon, which is the manifestation of a false or alternate memory—sometimes known as the Mandela Effect as significant portions of the population swore and still possibly maintain that they have vivid, shared memories of Nelson Mandela’s funeral years prematurely.