Dear catnappers, My first semester in college, in an effort to stymie all academic progress, one of my suitemates unveiled an aging Nintendo console along with a cache of video game cartridges. Mind you, this was 1999, at which point the original Nintendo—a not-very-sexy gray box—was decidedly outdated. It was hardly unusual, for instance, to [...]
Archive for the ‘music’ Category
Nintendo Days
Posted in leisure, music, technology, tagged atari, gaming, legend of zelda, metroid, nintendo, super mario bros, video games, vintage on July 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Music Mags From the Age of Implosion
Posted in music, periodicals, tagged crawdaddy, creem on April 19, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Dear iTunes addicts, Today’s post comes to you courtesy of Jack Hamilton, a fellow PhD student in Harvard’s American Civilization program. He is currently at work on his dissertation titled ‘Rubber Souls’: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, 1963-1971. Before coming to Harvard, Jack was a contributor to Rolling Stone and Paper, among other [...]
Getting to Home Plate With Sheet Music and Tobacco Cards
Posted in Baltimore, baseball, leisure, music, sports, tagged Baltimore Orioles, baseball on April 7, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Dear seventh-inning stretchers, With President Obama’s high and wide pitch, baseball season is officially upon us. So I turned to Matthew Mugmon to dig into the archive for signs of the pastime’s past. Matthew is a graduate student in music at Harvard, whose dissertation looks at the relationship between American modernism and the music of Austrian [...]
Melting Pots, Male Quartets, and Les Miserables Music-less
Posted in education, lectures, music, theater, Uncategorized, tagged Chautauqua, University of Iowa on January 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Dear dawdlers, Forgive this lazy scholar, returning after a prolonged sabbatical. Not that I have not been working, researching, and blogging, too—albeit on another site. (You can read some of those less lazy dispatches on Post-Post-Jew). I even watched the entire first season of Heroes. So you can tell, I have been productive. But I’m [...]
Hanukkah Caroling
Posted in fun, holidays, Jews, music, tagged hanukkah on December 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Dear holiday lovers, In case you’ve lost track of your candle-lighting, tonight’s the sixth night of Hanukkah—a.k.a. the Festival of Lights, a.k.a. the Jewish Christmas, a.k.a. an excuse to eat oily, fried foods. Hanukkah sometimes felt like a hard holiday to get into as a kid. I loved the eight days of presents and the [...]
The Divided States #1: Pennsylvania Mania!
Posted in books, Divided States, fashion, music, poetry, shopping, visual culture, tagged Pennsylvania on December 14, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Dear searchers of lost time, Some of you might know that I have an odd fascination with the state guide project commissioned by the WPA during the Great Depression—a series of guidebooks detailing the history, customs, and sights of each and every corner of the nation. The guidebooks vary widely in quality, yet they remain [...]
Musical Marxists and Jazz Hands
Posted in music, musicals, theater, video, tagged music, musical, video on October 28, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Dear die-hard dilettantes, Some of you know that I’m a teaching fellow this semester for a popular course at Harvard called, “Gender and Performance,” taught by the extraordinary Professor Robin Bernstein. This week’s all about Bertolt Brecht, an artist I’ve had a love-hate relationship with ever since my freshman year encounter with Mother Courage. I’m [...]
Dust Bowl Ballads of Love, Loneliness, and Mules
Posted in music, photography, tagged dust bowl, folk music, folklife, Library of Congress, music on October 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
To the easily exhausted, Believe it or not, I was a lazy scholar even in high school. Ah yes, the days of Netscape and dial-up service, I remember them like they were yesterday! Even then you could find me at my family’s computer, scouring online archives for primary sources sooner than I’d touch the dusty [...]