George Case's Blog, page 6

The Great Migration

In 2021 the transgender actor Elliot (nee Ellen) Page was featured on the cover of Time magazine, an achievement no longer quite as significant as it was in 1960 or 1992 but still, presumably, a boost to the transgender cause. About the same time, the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue featured a transgender model, Leyna […]

I Should Have Known Better

As a lifelong Beatles fan, I’m well aware that the 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night has an esteemed place in the band’s legacy: a filmed document of Beatlemania at its glorious height, and a surprise artistic triumph that demonstrated the Beatles’ unstoppable conquest of all media. It’s routinely cited as a cinema classic, and […]

Pop Music Myths III

I once read an essay in a special edition of Life magazine on the history of rock ‘n’ roll, wherein the writer, discussing 1960s music, paid tribute to “the detonation that was Aretha Franklin.”  Aretha was the Queen of Soul and an influential artist, but was her career really so explosive?  This kind of hyperbole […]

Pop Music Myths II

Another common fallacy held by music fans, music journalists, and too many aspiring musicians, is that popular recordings and concerts automatically bring lottery-like wealth to the artists.  While of course many well-known performers earned a lot of money, the history of the medium is replete with stars who ended up broke, or at least far […]

Pop Music Myths I

As someone who’s researched countless biographies, histories, and cultural analyses of rock and pop music over many years, and as a writer who’s contributed several of my own works to the same literature, I feel qualified to comment on some recurring clichés and unquestioned assumptions which characterize music criticism and music appreciation.  I like listening […]

10 Great Pre-CGI Warbird Movies

One of the great things about the cinematic art, perhaps the greatest thing, is its popular appeal. You don’t have to understand the language of film to appreciate individual films; you don’t have to be a film geek to get geeky over your favorite actors, scenes, or filmed subjects. There are no doubt plenty of […]

Exeunt Deus

This week marks the 58th 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.   […]

I Loved You Sweet Leaf

Bob Marley was once asked if he thought any national authority would ever legalize marijuana.  “I don’t know if this government will,” the reggae superstar reflected, “but I know Christ’s government will.”  If Bob’s ghost was to visit Canada today, where cannabis has been officially sanctioned since 2018 and weed retailers have proliferated like Starbucks, […]

Dumbing Down Dissent: Fads and Fallacies in Political Discourse

After a few rejections by traditional publishers, I elected to make my short manuscript of Dumbing Down Dissent available on the print-on-demand platform of CreateSpace, owned by Amazon, in 2011.  Since the publishing industry was and is being transformed by the internet, it seemed an option worth pursuing:  rather than invest in producing hundreds of physical […]

Brawl In the Family

For all the tributes lately paid to the American television producer Norman Lear, who died on December 5 at the age of 101, I still recall the dissenting opinions offered by Mad magazine in its parodies of Lear’s shows All In the Family (“Gall In the Family Fare”) and Maude (“Bawde”) during their 1970s heyday. […]