Carl Scott

Michael Anton’s fine essay on the Beach Boys, California culture, and the SMiLE Sessions album is now available on the Claremont Review of Books website. On the merits of SMiLE , compare and contrast his take with my Songbook essay, The SMiLE that Wasn’t . He doesn’t quite admit that . . . . Continue Reading »

Don’t let Pete’s title fool you below. He has this “point 2” innocuously presented as some “thoughts” on “other things,” which turns out to be one of the most devastating indictments of contemporary liberalism you’ll ever read. It absolutely destroys . . . . Continue Reading »

Pop music critic Simon Reynolds, in his book Retromania , and style-writer Kurt Andersen, in his “You Say You Want a Devolution” essay, have their finger upon a certain pattern in our contemporary cultural scenes of recyle-ment, repetition, and lack of forward motion. To be more specific, . . . . Continue Reading »

The new Obama biography by David Maraniss finds still more composites haunting the pages of Dreams of My Father . That “still more” is not surprising, as Dreams says up front that some composites have been employed, but the importance of them to the narrative, and the lengths to which the . . . . Continue Reading »

And not with pacifists. Ricochet member and pomocon friend Flagg Taylor is over in the Czech Republic again, and sending home dissidents’ reports of what it was like to hear a U.S. president to speak openly against the communist oppression they lived under. . . . . Continue Reading »

Those who know more on Bradbury’s bio can fill us in on the question of his religion, but at the least, he was a writer making a sane and conservative use of our longingly imaginative leaps into the future. A stark contrast to the now-forlorn future-faith of folks like rock critic Simon . . . . Continue Reading »

Does anyone not know the story of Icarus? . . . let us imagine that young Icarus manages to actually live through this ordeal: he falls back into the labyrinth . . . bruised but still alive. . . . He has to go back to normal life after having thought himself capable of attaining the sun . . . Today . . . . Continue Reading »

As a book on pop-music, Simon Reynolds’ Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past earns a high B, but does not rate among my very favorites, being too beholden to Rock attitudes, and too long-winded for its own good. Some of its detail is welcome—I found Reynold’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Most insightful analysis here . . . . . Continue Reading »

There are many mysterious things about the modern world, but the biggest mystery of all is how “the sexual revolution” is viewed as some sort of feminist triumph, when the objective truth is that if the most despicable, cretinous, woman-loathing men of a century ago had outlined their . . . . Continue Reading »