THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Is it bad that I feel that one or both of the people in this picture -- the only political ticket that has the best chance of handing the Cult of Trump a defeat -- will be killed in 2020 by a member of the Cult of Trump? For when the Cult of Trump is threatened with the possibility of dissolution via the electoral process, what do you think the individual cult members will do to keep the Cult of Trump a viable sustained entity? When Donald Trump knows that prison is his only likely outcome if he loses the Presidency in 2020, why wouldn't you expect that he would do anything to keep the Cult of Trump alive? After all, what did Jim Jones do when the forces of reality closed in on Jonestown? First off, I'm using "Cult of Trump" based on Michael Langone's work on the defining characteristics of cults , and there's no shortage of valid and reliable evidence to illustrate that what we're currently experience is rule by the Cult of Trump. In no particular ...

When I lived outside of Roscommon as a kid in the early '80s, on the dusty dirt road known as Pere Cheney Road -- named for the 1800's lumber town, long since abandoned -- there was such a thing as television. Our TV set, antennas perched atop a plastic proxy for solid wood, had CBS and PBS in strong signals on VHF, along with intermittent contact with NBC, as well as ABC on UHF. In other words, the stories that television brought into my life were scarce and precious. And as banal as they often were, I longed for the days when I could have more. Well, those days are here, and holy shit. When I look back at the "television" I watched in 2019, from network fare to premium channel content to streaming chunks, my first big takeaway is "be careful what you wish for." As a consumer resigned to dip into lands of make-believe while the climate crisis revs its global engines, there's just not enough hours in the day to watch everything that might resonate. ...

Last winter, I had an online section of Contemporary Film, which I defined as "some sweet and/or important movies from the 21st Century." Only six students signed up, and throughout the semester, they watched the movies I assigned -- cultural artifacts designed to be shown in theaters -- on their phones through links in Brightspace, our online learning management system at NCMC. As much as it negatively impacted what I wanted the experience to be, one has to be pragmatic and facilitate convenience. But I know I am doing the artifacts a disservice by doing so, like I'm shitting on the face of cinema. Over the past few weeks, noted directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have attacked the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- words like "that's not cinema" and "despicable" have fallen from their mouths like turds falling into drinks -- by equating those films to theme park entertainments rather than potentially transcendent cinema. In th...

One of the reasons that I keep using Facebook, aside from it being the easiest path of connection to my family and friends, is that I play Scrabble through it. Now, I’m not great at Scrabble, as I’m not great at most things, but I feel that it gives me a bit more cognitive stimulation than Solitare or any of the iterations of Candy Crush, so I keep at it. Typically, I play with random Facebook folks, but every now and again, I’ll play against the same person for a few different games over the course of a couple weeks. And then, there’s the case of Carl E. N. to consider. Now, I wouldn’t call myself a social player, in that I don’t chat with my opponents. (I did here and there back in the day when I first started playing, but after a few bad actors — boring obscenities, puzzling statements, a couple dudes talking shit like they were playing for their varsity letter in Scrabble — I cut that shit out.) And after a couple consecutive games with the same person, I’ll tap out or they wil...

Over three decades ago, "Soldier Of Love" dominated the Top 40 airwaves, putting Donny Osmond back at the top reaches of the American charts -- and at the forefront of pop culture -- for the first time since the halcyon days of the '70s, where the bedemined whiteness of The Osmonds sat queerly next to the Quaalude smiles and quasi-incestuous vibe of Donny & Marie. And like many pop oddities, it only happened due to a confluence of personal fandom and music biz machinations, for The Masked Singer of 2019 would only break through in 1989 as the man with no name. A Top 30 hit in the U.K. in 1988, "Soldier Of Love" was not initially released in the U.S., as Osmond did not have a record deal in America at the time. However, a cassette of the song from a British import was sent by an Osmond fan to Jessica Ettinger, the acting Program Director and Music Director at ABC’s WPLJ-FM New York. Ettinger liked the song but was concerned that Osmond, a former child star...

It was 1999, and for most people, Robert Palmer was a cultural footnote, the guy from the ‘80s videos, forever wearing sharp suits while mannequin-like ladies mimed and jiggled behind him . He was four years away from dying way too young at 54 years of age, but his at-that-point moribund career had preceded his physical demise, as his first solo album in a half-decade, entitled Rhythm & Blues , came and went without much notice or fanfare. No hits, no videos of note, just a record on a tiny label distributed by a reissue arm of a multinational company about to get kneecapped by technological innovation. In other words, blip and blink. The reviews -- that is, what reviews were generated -- didn't help, either: “ …not groundbreaking or particularly innovative ” said Dave Kendrick of the Hartford Courant (in an otherwise positive blurb at the time of the album’s release), and “ there is neither actual rhythm nor blues on or anywhere around this album (except perhaps the blues f...

"What is the cost of lies?" When I was younger -- my family and I were lower middle class, living outside of a small town in the middle of northern lower Michigan -- there were limited options for media. Top 40 radio and three and a half TV channels and a few local movie theaters were the windows to the larger world, a place that seemed to offer no pathway to connection aside from how one would feel from the stories the media offered up. Of course, most of those stories were loosely tethered to fact, even the oxymoronic "based on a true story," but in the mostly literal mind of a preadolescent, they felt as real as the warmth of the clothes dryer in my bedroom. Now, I live in a world of overwhelming media options, where several lives could be lived in parallel fashion with completely different media experiences, where choice is both a tyranny and a paradox. On a daily basis, this means that I miss stuff that I know would be appealing, but with only so many hours...