George Case's Blog, page 10

Minstrel of the Dawn

Music fans, especially Canadian ones, are mourning Gordon Lightfoot this week. The singer-songwriter, who died on May 1 at the age of eighty-four, occupied a unique place in our culture. He had a better voice than Bob Dylan or Neil Young, a better ear for melody than Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, and a more […]

Coming Down Fast

It is a disconcerting fact that the world’s most infamous “mass murderer” did not physically kill the people for whose deaths he is usually held responsible. Charles Manson, who died in 2017 and the subject of a well-researched 2014 biography by Jeff Guinn, was at worst the orchestrator of the Tate-LaBianca massacres of August 1969, […]

Representative Democracy

Advocates for electoral reform often denounce systems wherein one party can win fifty-one percent of the popular vote (or less) and still win one hundred percent of the legislative seats.  Rather than award victory to the candidate who merely squeaks by her rivals after all the ballots are counted, the alternative of proportional representation would […]

Paint It Black

The most refreshing aspect of Jack Hamilton’s 2016 book, Just Around Midnight:  Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, is that it doesn’t rehearse the familiar history of popular music as a long sequence of white artists ripping off Black ones for fun and profit.  Instead Hamilton is more interested in the history of popular […]

Exeunt Deus

This week marks the 57th anniversary of Time magazine’s famous cover story, “Is God Dead?” Today, as newspapers and magazines struggle for readership and relevance, it’s hard to imagine how a weekly print journal could much affect popular sentiment, but in April 1966 Time was virtually an arbiter of middlebrow American opinion and morals.   […]

The Best of Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) is one of the most important and influential filmmakers of all time.  For generations of movie buffs and aspiring cineastes, he was a model of visual innovation and creative autonomy, and it was Kubrick, before anyone else, who came to embody the popular conception of what a movie director should be.  If […]

Schlock Babylon

Pussycat’s Nine Lives Used Up – Josie Jones, leader of the iconic Pussycats band whose songs became anthems of a generation, was shot and killed by a deranged fan outside her New York City apartment yesterday.  Jones, known for her ears, tail, and uniquely rectangular fretless and stringless guitar, was the author of the Pussycats’ […]

The Long Crisis

“If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention,” has been a common refrain from the political fringe for many years.  These days it’s not even confined to the fringe:  believers in the deep state, in QAnon, and in Satanic pedophile rings have formed a crucial bloc of the electorate in the United States and elsewhere […]

While My Guitars Gently Weep

It’s been a while since I hung out in a musical instrument shop, but I still flip through the latest issues of Guitar World, Guitar Player, and Guitar Aficionado when I find them on the newsstand, and I still feel a shiver of lust looking at what can only be described as guitar porn.  If […]

Freedom and Weep

My oddest experience with Freedom to Read Week, the annual anti-censorship campaign observed in Canada from February 19 to February 25 this year, came during my stint in a Vancouver book shop.  I was enlisted to collect a stack of titles to put in the storefront display along with a poster and other bumf announcing […]