On this:

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The Bee Gees (authors and performers of "Stayin' Alive") were active beginning in roughly 1958 (i.e., nearly sixty years ago). They wrote "Stayin' Alive" as part of Saturday Night Fever's soundtrack. That film came out in 1977 (i.e., nearly forty years ago). The dancer in the video is John Travolta, who was 23 at the ( Read more... )

In Ryan's absence, I've been watching a lot of RuPaul's Drag Race. I've actually watched all three seasons that are available, in full, online, so I am basically "caught up." I've enjoyed these shows because I feel that they help reconnect me with the transgressiveness (no pun intended) of being gay ( Read more... )

I recently came across this bit, by Mark Svenvold, from a poem titled, "Lines Composed an Hour and Ten Minutes by Interstate from South Orange, New Jersey, from a Title Written by a Student and Drawn at Random from a Hat, in Late August, 2011."

Sometimes nostalgia ( Read more... )

I've been reading Terra Nostra, by Carlos Fuentes. This is a massive novel, with lots of different themes, but one of them emerges near the end of the book. One of the novel's prominent characters, Ludovico (a Spaniard), has been working for an eccentric and hermetic scholar in Venice (the time period being roughly the late fifteenth/early ( Read more... )

A few videos:

[Several YouTube Embeds Hidden]

Iggy Azalea:

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DJ Snake and Lil Jon:

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Nikki Minaj:

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So I try to keep my ear turned to what's happening in contemporary pop music, just because I find the ways that it develops (potentially) fascinating, in a kind of musicological sense, while also being a source for new music that I enjoy for its own sake. When listening to this ( Read more... )

Ryan and I are moving to New York. Ryan, at the end of this week. Me, sometime in the next several months, after I've gotten the office transfer and bar admission stuff sorted. Hopefully sooner than later, but the bar admission process may dictate a certain schedule ( Read more... )

I've been looking over my friend-of list. A lot of old, well-remembered names, attached to accounts that now seem entirely defunct.

There's 1144, the mood-swingy objectivist. booksoverbombs, pintofmalaga, turkishb, each of them a genius, each of them no doubt gone in search of higher levels of engagement. moremi, the corrupted soul who thought I would find his charm irresistable. Three of ( Read more... )

The other day I walked past a random piece of litter on the ground, a bright yellow square of packaging for Juicy Fruit. It immediately brought to mind the familiar jingle from my youth, a thirty- or fifteen-second generic riff in a genre that I find hard to describe as anything other than "jingle music of the eighties." My first response to this ( Read more... )

I don't think I've ever shared this before.

Two videos of the same scene, from Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel. The opera generally follows the fairy tale we know; the scene is the witch's showstopper in the last act, as she prepares the children for their imminent transformation into gingerbread ( Read more... )

I will be 36 in just over a month. The number is not significant except for drawing comparisons. At 36, for instance, I'll be able to say that there are people now passing into adulthood who were born only after I had myself done so. At 36, my father had five kids, the oldest of us (i.e., me) only 8 or 9 years old ( Read more... )