Tag: American pop culture

What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 4 — Music and Identity

gordsellar13 Comments
This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. When my family moved from Nova Scotia to Saskatchewan, I had a pretty hard time of it. Understatement of my life, but it’ll do. The move began a long period of having the shit kicked out of me, and then struggling to find a way to fit into a youth culture I didn’t really understand. I was almost certainly dealing with PTSD from all the violence; I was definitely emotionally a mess; I was …

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 3 — Hybridity

gordsellar6 Comments
This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. Last time, in Part 2 of this series, I talked about “ear training” and the skills that are required by certain kinds of music if one is to listen to them competently–the requirement of a degree of work, a degree of slogging up a learning curve to grasp those kinds of music. The parallel for my overarching analogy of those mostly eat TV dinners and junk food on the one hand, and the self-described …

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 1 — Background, Caveats, and an Analogy to Consider

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This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

I’ve been working for about a week now to put together a blog post that simply isn’t working. Like a story built to fail, the damned thing just is not cohering, no matter what i do: it veers off the road, it catches on fire, and when I put out the fire, the engine won’t turn over. So I’ve decided to break it down into pieces. Maybe. It depends whether that is still necessary at the end of this thing I’m writing now. It’s hard because, frankly, I think that what we conventionally include in the category of music includes …

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Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones

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Jewish Geeks, Italian Gangsters, Porn, Businessmen, Comics, Superheroes, Artists, Ghost-Artists, Wives and Girlfriends… and Superman. That, in a nutshell, is what this book deals with. But then, in a nutshell, humans are water, some meat, a little electricity, and dreams. That isn’t the story, and what the story of this book is, is the story of geek culture — its genesis, its struggle to survive, and its eventual triumph. Even if, like me, you’re more familiar with comic book characters through their cinematic adaptations, this book is worth a look. While I’m not a Superman fan, I was not bothered …

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