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Jumbling Up Culture (Whatever You Want To Call It)

How is it that “high” culture and pop culture separated so thoroughly? “I’m not quite sure how it got to be this way — writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other — because it wasn’t always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I’m not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of “culture” — highbrow, middlebrow, popular — even make sense any more.”

When Fans Become Organized Fans (Is That Bad?)

“Most people are fans of some cultural product or another: a football team, a soap opera, a rock band, a political party. But organized fandom is widely derided for its allegedly excessive devotion to trivial entertainments. Similar stereotypes used to dominate the academy, particularly among critics of capitalism and/or modernity, for whom the fan was the slack-jawed, brainwashed embodiment of consumer culture—the viewer who didn’t merely swallow passively the pulp fictions produced by the culture industry, but centered a large part of her life around those same products…”

Fleisher: Music In Words

Leon Fleisher is king of the musical metaphors. “Listening to Fleisher talk about music is delightfully dizzying. The metaphors come in an endless flow. Play like a cat, he might say, but with sheathed claws. Play it like a Bavarian milkmaid, not like Britney Spears. Fingers shouldn’t be hammers, they should be dolphin flippers. This chord change could be from a Marlene Dietrich song; croak over it.”

Margaret Atwood On Being Atwood:

“Atwood’s dragon persona is less fire-breathing than gently, relentlessly smouldering. She can isolate the moment she became a writer – “became”, naturally, not “wanted to become” – in 1956, when she was “crossing the football field on the way home from school. I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that writing was the only thing I wanted to do.”

Building A Case For War

Historically, wars have influenced the architecture of their times. And is the current war finding its way into our buildings? “It is fascinating to see these concerns translated into architectural styles: unselfconsciously, as in the Cambridge Crown Court; and flamboyantly, like the mock castles built at the time of the Napoleonic wars, or the concrete bunkers built during the cold war.”

Psychology Critique Under Attack

Psychologist Lauren Slater’s new book “Opening Skinner’s Box” has been hailed as “a bridge the gap between academic and popular psychology,” but the experts are attacking. “Some say that she put invented quotations in her new book. Others question her methods and data in her own experiment in faking mental illness or challenge the accuracy of her description of some famous past experiments. Critics have been publicizing their accusations in book reviews on Amazon.com and other Internet sites, while professors at several schools, including Harvard, Columbia and Emory universities, have been exchanging information on their views of the book’s failings.”

Two Magazines – A Letter Between Them

There’s “America” magazine and “American” magazine, and they couldn’t be more different. “The two magazines nicely convey the dyads: rural and urban, mass and elite, red and blue. America’s America is sleek, multiracial and wonderfully coiffed. The images on the oversize, foil-edged pages are outré; in one photo essay the actress Juliette Lewis is curled up in a refrigerator, having a moment with herself. Using hip-hop as its motif the magazine roams across fashion, film and technology. It takes the reader behind the velvet ropes and assumes anyone who is reading it belongs there: America magazine defines and covers its own species. American Magazine’s America seems more like a teddy bear you can hold on your lap.”