Tag Archives: Herman Melville

new forms for old feeling

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Dave

Profit as evidence of god’s approval for the sacred project of America buffeting the shock between business and piety, lucre and morality. The Emersonian chosen people, selected, picked for a special destiny. Many are called, few are frozen; a form … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media | Tagged Alexis de Tocqueville, Constance Rourke, David Brooks, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, herman cain, Herman Melville, Jean Baudrillard, justin townes earle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, Steve Earle | Leave a comment

catching a falling knife

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Dave

Herman Cain. The dandy and the legacy of Amos n’ Andy. The Hermanator experience. The old black minstrel show adjusted for free market ideology. Another figure in a long tradition of American snake oil salesmen rising from the depths of … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media | Tagged Al Jolson, Bell Hooks, Bill Maher, boyce watkins, Charles Baudelaire, Constance Rourke, Edgar Allan Poe, herman cain, Herman Melville, Holly Sklar, Jean Genet, jim crow, jon stewart, julius lester, mark harris Z communications, mel watkins, Noam Chomsky, shirley temple, snoop doggy dog, the hermanator experience, thomas rice, Walter Benjamin | Comments Off

the one after 193

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Dave

Not something from the back of a cereal box. A real country. Or some neutered and coiffed Bantustan experiment with nifty uniforms and fan-far parades. Real borders and a real economy. Or a box within a box and the welfare … Continue reading →

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged Amy Goodman, artemisia Gentileschi, barack obama israel, cornel west, denis goldberg, Herman Melville, Jan van Eyck, jan van eyck ghent altarpiece, mahmoud abbas, meir margailt, Naomi Klein, Nicolas Poussin, noah j. efron, Noam Chomsky, palestinian statehood, Paul Klee, Peter Paul Rubens, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Rembrandt, ronit lentin, yakov m. rabkin | Leave a comment

individualism as a performance art

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Dave

Can we ever be free of conformity or is it just, as in Atlas Shrugged, part of what John Galt says, “part of escaping the necessity of choice.” Is the idea of making a choice, making decisions, a form of conformity? … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word | Tagged alex knapp, Andrew Potter, Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand, Constance Rourke, david rieff, Edward Bernays, George Orwell, henry rollins, Herman Melville, joseph heath, paul leinberger, thomas frank the baffler, Thorstein Veblen | Leave a comment

the importance of being ernest

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Art

An urge to get ahead in his own awkward way and still be loved. Jim Varney. An American archetype with a long tradition; at least going back to before the civil war and the times of Herman Melville. In Constance … Continue reading →

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media, Miscellaneous, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged art chantry, buddy ebson, buster cherry, Constance Rourke, ernest p. worrell, Herman Melville, Jerry Lewis, jim varney, Shakespeare | Leave a comment

vaudeville: the eiron and alazon act

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Dave

Vaudeville. Vaudeville, from the height of its appeal to its demise (1870-1930) remained a mass entertainment firmly planted in the lowbrow. Beneath vaudeville was burlesque which occupied a narrow band that teetered towards pornography and back to decadence. But lowbrow … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media, Miscellaneous, Music/Composition/Performance | Tagged Adele Astaire, Aleister Crowley, bill bojangles robinson, Constance Rourke, Edward Bernays, eva tanguay, Fred Astaire, george ade, george fuller golden, gilbert seldes, Herman Melville, kevin courrier, nathanael west, Randy Newman, shirley temple, travis stewart, Walt Whitman | Leave a comment

fortune has it

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Dave

He tried for popular acclaim and never got there. It may have accelerated his undoing. Phil Ochs. A folkie of a time that now seems far removed from where we are today.He always seemed a bit marginal; not the archetype … Continue reading →

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Miscellaneous, Music/Composition/Performance | Tagged Bob Dylan, Chris Barsanti, Christopher Hitchens, Clement Greenberg, Cole Porter, Edgar Allan Poe, George Gershwin, Herman Melville, Jermoe Kern, Jim Glover, Kenneth Bowser, Max Horkheimer, Phil Ochs, Randy Newman, Theodor Adorno, Van Dyke Parks, Walter Benjamin, Woody Guthrie | Leave a comment

DARK DREAMS: WRITING ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER

Posted on November 27, 2010 by Dave

The search for myth, for universal patterns is necessarily a search for the meaning of modern life. Or, it can be viewed as an attempt to escape from it. At this point Harlan Ellison’s quest becomes perilous and paradoxical in … Continue reading →

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word, Miscellaneous, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged Allen Ginsberg, Charles Darwin, Ellen Weil, Eric Shanower, Erik Nelson, Gary K. Wolfe, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Herman Melville, Jacek Yerka, John Steinbeck, Josh Olson, Josh Wimmer, Lauren Davis, Lewis Wallace, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Paul di Flippo, William Blake | Leave a comment

DIDDLERS: SECRETS HIDDEN IN THE SHUFFLE

Posted on November 15, 2010 by Dave

It’s what Griel Marcus termed ”the old, weird America.”; a peculiar terrain, a strange yet familiar backdrop to a common cultural history of America : the “playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of … Continue reading →

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word, Marketing/Advertising/Media, Miscellaneous, Music/Composition/Performance | Tagged Boardwalk Empire HBO, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Constance Rourke, David B. Kesterton, De Tocqueville, Edgar Allan Poe, Griel Marcus, Herman Melville, Jesse Bier, John Goodman, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Larry Charles, Luc Sante, Matt Goldberg, Michael Moore, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Fulford, Ruth Schwartz, Sinclair Lewis, Stephanie Zacharek, Stephen Matterson, Van Dyke Parks, Virginia Heffernan, William E. Lenz | Leave a comment

LISTENING TO THE BACK BEAT

Posted on September 11, 2010 by Dave

” …and, escorted by two police cars, the group drove to a ball park on the corner of Army Street and Portero Avenue, where they played a game against the Bank of California ‘Nuggets’, to prove to the squares that … Continue reading →