George Case's Blog, page 9
July 14, 2023
Music Had Charms
“Today’s music ain’t got the same soul,” Bob Seger sang in 1979’s “Old Time Rock and Roll.” By “today’s music,” did he mean Pink Floyd’s The Wall, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, Neil Young’s Live Rust, The Police’s Regatta de Blanc, or Bob Marley’s Survival? By most measures, those are pretty soulful records, or at least records […]
July 7, 2023
Post-Truth Hits Everybody
While I totally get the alarms raised by the Trump minions’ invocations of “alternate facts” and “fake news,” I must admit that some of their calculated avoidance of reality has been enabled by the way all of us consume reportage and information today. Many citizens, me included, now get most of our accounts of […]
June 30, 2023
Space Oddities
Being skeptical of provocative claims, these days, can make you seem at best a killjoy – “Hey, it’s just harmless speculation” – and at worst a sucker – “Oh, so you’ve bought into the official narrative, have you?” And there are a lot of topics to be skeptical about, from a lot of angles, ranging […]
June 23, 2023
The Year(s) In Review
An odd subcategory of nonfiction publishing has sprung up in the last couple of decades: books about years. There’s Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970 (2011), What You Want Is in the Limo: On the Road with Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and the Who […]
June 16, 2023
In the Flesh
In their lives and in their memoirs, rock stars run the occupational hazard of having the most interesting bits clustered at the beginning, while the latter portions tend to feature a lot of belated self-reflection to compensate for the absence of much professional accomplishment. Such is the case with the 2019 autobiography Face It, by […]
June 9, 2023
Mixed Messages
The new technology that allows researchers to trace their personal heritage in great depth – online resources like Ancestry.com and commercial DNA tests like 23 and Me – comes with some unintended consequences. We have long been used to describing ourselves and others with broad characterizations of race, and to categorize people by unchallenged assumptions […]
June 2, 2023
From Cover to Cover
There’s an interesting development on North American magazine stands right now: two venerable US publications, Harper’s and The Atlantic, are running lead articles with opposing views on the war in Ukraine. The Atlantic piece is titled “The Counteroffensive,” by staff writer Anne Applebaum and editor Jeffrey Goldberg, and has the weighty tag sentence, “The future […]
May 26, 2023
Get Your Wings
I’m a big fan of both aviation art and rock ‘n’ roll, and this gallery of original works in a variety of media shows my attempts to combine the two. I like the incongruity of advertising classic rock songs with wartime scenes: they shouldn’t really go together, but for listeners and viewers of a certain […]
May 19, 2023
The P is Silent
As a middle-aged person who reads magazines, watches TV shows, and looks at internet sites broadly aimed at my generation, I can’t help but notice the increasing number of ads for personal incontinence products, i.e. adult diapers. I’m happy to say, and you’ll be happy to hear, that I have no need for such items […]
May 12, 2023
False (Freak) Flag Operation
There is an exclusive list of shocking events which subsequently become fodder for conspiracy theories. The bombing of Pearl Harbour. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. The death of Princess Diana. 9/11. The Sandy Hook mass shooting. Each of those is claimed by the theorists to have been […]
