Sometime in the mid-1990s, my father gave me his hi-end, hi-fi stereo system from the mid-1970s: a vacuum tube-powered amplifier, pair of stereo speakers in walnut cabinets, and a turntable. Heavy, bulky, and built with hardly an ounce of plastic between them, these components lacked all of the functionality we look for in consumer audio …
Hear Joni Mitchell’s Earliest Recording, Rediscovered After More than 50 Years
How excited would you be to listen to a recording, made at an AM radio station in 1963, labeled “JONI ANDERSON AUDITION TAPE”? If you know much about the singer-songwriters of the mid-20th century, you’d be quite excited indeed. For Joni Anderson is none other than Joni Mitchell, who under that married name would go …
Watch a Newly-Restored Peter Gabriel-Era Genesis Concert Film From 1973 in Stunning 4K Quality
There are two late-20th century rock bands named Genesis and both of them featured Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, and Tony Banks. The second Genesis we know of as one of the biggest-selling bands of all time and authors of such massive hits as “Land of Confusion,” “In Too Deep,” and “Throwing It All Away.” The …
Godzilla, Kong, et al: Stupid Fun or Channeling Deep Fears? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #90
https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_90_4-17-21.mp3 What’s the meaning behind the continued international popularity of kaiju media in which giant creatures stomp on cities and beat each other up? Is this just pro wrestling drama with special effects, or does it relate to deep-seated feelings of helplessness in the face of natural disasters? Perhaps both? Your Pretty Much Pop hosts …
Watch the “Greatest Juggler of the Ages,” Frances Brunn, Perform His “Painfully Exciting” Juggling Routine (1969)
When John Ringling North, then president of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, saw a pair of German jugglers and acrobats perform in Spain, he immediately invited them to join “the Greatest Show on Earth.” A brother and sister team, Francis and Lottie Brunn would astonish audiences. In 1950, theater critic Brooks Atkinson called …
How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invented Lincoln Logs, “America’s National Toy” (1916)
How many architectural careers have been kindled by Lincoln Logs? Since their invention in the mid-1910s, these deceptively simple wooden building blocks have entertained generations of children, whichever profession they entered upon growing up. I myself have fond memories of playing with Lincoln Logs, which, with about 70 years of history already behind them, were …
Watch Metallica Play “Enter Sandman” Before a Crowd of 1.6 Million in Moscow, During the Final Days of the Soviet Union (1991)
In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union a “triumphalist discourse” arose in the U.S., writes historian Richard Sakwa, “which suggests that the Soviet demise was a deliberate act plotted and executed by president Ronald Reagan” with massive military budgets and nuclear threats. This narrative has less exclusive currency today. There are as …
Amazon Is Giving Away 10 Free Kindle eBooks for World Book Day (Until April 24)
FYI: You can download 10 free international ebooks as part of Amazon’s free giveaway for World Book Day. Writes CNET: World Book Day is on April 23 and to celebrate the day, alternatively referred to as World Book and Copyright Day or International Day of the Book, Amazon is giving away 10 Kindle ebooks from around the …
The Beautiful, Innovative & Sometimes Dark World of Animated Soviet Propaganda (1925-1984)
Growing up, we assembled our worldview from several different sources: parents, siblings, classmates. But for most of us, wherever and whenever we passed our formative years, nothing shaped our early perceptions of life as vividly, and as thoroughly, as cartoons — and this is just as Lenin knew it would be. “With the establishment of …
Watch Four Short Films That Interpret Songs from Leonard Cohen’s Posthumous Album, Thanks for the Dance
Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker is a bleak masterpiece. Released just 19 days before his death, the album sounds like a warning from beyond, one Cohen seemed to know we’d never heed. His sympathy for human failure reached its denouement in the posthumous Thanks for the Dance, a project “much less apocalyptic” in tone than …