This week’s F5 question comes from among the Green Boogers in Laura’s extensive collection: I have a confession to make: I actually like watching those lame, cliche-filled success-story films. You know the ones I mean – girl works her way off the streets and ends up studying in Harvard; boy wants to dance his own steps; girl wants to sing but her mother forbids it. Yeah. Hallmark channel material. Add a pot of ice cream and a box of tissues and I’m all set for the evening. Now that I revealed my darkest secret, what are your five most uncool …
Month: May 2004
On Pharoah Sanders
This morning, while listening to the album Tauhid, I was suddenly interested in Pharoah Sanders again, so I started looking him up online. I found a lot of junky pages but a few good things. Here’s one of them, a good little interview with Pharoah Sanders at JazzTimes. I mean, with an excerpt like this, how can you resist? “Can we talk?” I ask Pharoah Sanders. “OK, long as we don’t get into the John Coltrane thing,” laughs Master P. “I don’t know what I can say, that’s all over with.” It’s gotta be tough moving out from the shadow …
Modernity, Culture, and “Beauty” in Women
An interesting—though too-short— piece on the clash between modernity and traditional identity in Japanese society and the advent of the “modern Japanese woman”. I find this fascinating as a comparison point with Korea. How could one be both Japanese and modern, if modernity is defined as Western? Were modernity and Japaneseness antithetical? Or could individuals and society synthesize some new middle ground? If so, how? Might modernity have parallels in Japanese tradition, or, more precisely, in those practices actively being constructed as “tradition”? Stated conversely, did the Japanese past contain the seeds — the antecedents — of modernity? … It …
History of Bollocks
Over at SPIKED you can read review of a perhaps-tedious but interesting-sounding book of bollocks-bashing: A brief history of bollocks. It looks to be the sort of thing I’d write if I were a grumpy Brit man in late middle age. And I didn’t know that damnable creationism was such a problem in Britain. I thought it was only the waterheads of America who believed in that trash. Ah well…
Contact me.
Realized I had no contact info up. Now there’s a “contact me” in the sidebar. I’ll get a link in there soon, but for now it’s antispammer protected.