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Solomon Northup Objects
It was very late, and I was very tired, when I received a facebook message from one “Solomon Northup”: “What you’re saying here praising John Ridley [winner of the...
An Enemy Will Bring Us Together
In song, at least, the ’60s Culture Revolution began rather beautifully, with a call to smile upon your brother. Your brother was assumed to be all of mankind. We might...
Why Rock Couldn’t Stay at the Commune
It’s very cool, very punk-rock, folk-rock, and all the other rockin’ signifiers of hip radicalism, to be going to a commune. Or to hang-out at one for a season....
What Should We Read about George Washington?
It’s George Washington’s birthday, and the problem a lot of us have is that he comes across too stiffly for us to really appreciate. What we need are the...
Brotherly Love Came to Woodstock
Ang Lee’s 2009 film Taking Woodstock records an important milestone in the culture revolution of the 1960s, the rock festival and “Aquarian Exposition” held in August of 1969. It does...
Political Thuggery and the Abdication of the Moderates
The most important American political story of the last week or so is the one about the Dinesh D’Souza case. I do hear there was some speech given by...
Carl’s Rock Songbook #91: Love, “Alone Again Or”
Here’s a song that knows what it is to feel loneliness midst the Summer of Love: Yeah, I heard a funny thing: somebody said to me, that I could...
Jefferson Airplane’s Warning
Carl’s Rock Songbook is a series focusing on a particular rock song or issue connected to rock music. In the course of my learning the Gen-X alternative rock catechism,...
A First Thoughts Introduction to Carl’s Rock Songbook
Hello, First Thoughtsters!One of the things I’ll be carrying over from my blogging for Postmodern Conservative, now that it’s been incorporated into First Thoughts, is “Carl’s Rock Songbook.” What...
Carl’s Rock Songbook
Hello, First Thoughtsters! One of the things I’ll be carrying over from my blogging for Postmodern Conservative, now that it’s been incorporated into First Thoughts, is “Carl’s Rock Songbook.”...
Carl’s Rock Songbook
Hello, First Thoughtsters! One of the things I’ll be carrying over from my blogging for Postmodern Conservative, now that it’s been incorporated into First Thoughts, is “Carl’s Rock Songbook.”...
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS: 3 Cats, 2 Abortions, and 1 Failed Folk-Singer
Initially, I wasn’t going to recommend this film. I still cannot really do so for the most persons, and that is not in my book a sign that it...
The Spirit of Petrarch v. that of Homi Bhabha
Here is the original Heather MacDonald piece that prompted Matt Blakenship’s Ricochet musing about whether you should let your child major in English, which I proceeded to riff on...
Don’t Major in English?
So says Matt Blakenship over at Ricochet, prompted in part by the removal of a Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer requirement at UCLA by idiotically ideologue English faculty raving on...
Carl’s Rock Songbook #89: The Love-World of Jefferson Airplane’s First LP
In the last Songbook post, I talked about how “Let’s Get Together” was used by Jefferson Airplane to champion the practice of fraternal love. Such smile on your brother...