Category Archives: Pop Culture

Just in Time, Again and Again

Nina Simone at the Village GateBack on 08 May, I wrote that the recording of Nina Simone’s 1961 performance “At the Village Gate” was in heavy rotation on my CD player. That’s still the case. In fact, this past week, I became somewhat irrationally fixated on the disc’s opening track, “Just in Time.”

Simone’s performance of this small-scale paean to luck and love is sublime genius. She begins with her trademark casual precision, a subdued exuberance that quietly erupts towards the end into a beautiful, joyous crying. But these vocals are just bookends — after singing just a few bars at the beginning of the song she seemingly and suddenly abandons her audience to a quietly playful guitar, bass, drums.

The amazing trick she manages is this: defining the whole of the song by her very absence from its center, controlling that undefinable intersection of sound and time wherein the audience craves the form of her voice the most by not giving it over at all, withholding it almost cruelly. Yet, in spite of this absence, the whole of the song and every tiny detail in its crevices are clearly of her own design and volition — though the voice is gone, she’s not. She’s unmistakably there. It’s a brazenly confident gesture with which to open an evening’s performance, but her delivery and its effectiveness are immaculate. I’m left in wonder after each listen and I can’t get enough; since Thursday, I’ve had my CD player set to repeat that track without end.

Continue Reading …

+

Fashion Pictures: Do They Suck?

Fashion PicturesThere’s an interesting critique of the current state of fashion photography over at Slate. It bills itself as “An argument in pictures,” though it’s an argument that relies more on the cultural disparity between a semi-imagined golden age of fashion photography and today’s predictably bemoaned state of the same than on a real critique. What’s really interesting is the delivery of the argument, which is incredibly visual (if not perhaps overly so) — a kind of PowerPoint-like presentation in HTML, which is surprisingly rare on the Web. In spite of the weakness of the content, I kind of like the way it hits short, quick points. Now if only someone a little smarter would pick up on the form…

Continue Reading …

+

A List of Things I Consumed

This is a little late, but in December, the lists came out—‘best of’ lists, what’s in and what’s out lists, lists of New Year’s resolutions etc. So I figured, what the heck, I may as well make a list. I mean, that’s kind of what Internet content is all about— realizing the compulsion to express an opinion, regardless of intrinsic value — right?

Continue Reading …

+

Melody Maker, RIP

After 74 years of publishing, England’s Melody Maker music paper published its last issue ever this past Monday, citing a steep recent decline in newsstand sales. I’ll miss it; in my teens, I gave up comic books and turned to the British music tabloids, reading every issue I could get my hands on of both the Maker and its rival, the NME.

Continue Reading …

+