Category Archives: Video

Jorge Luis Borges

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo2Eo-G-1sE

Interview with Borges (Spanish with English subtitles)

On this date Borges died (1899 – 1986).

Frye in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: I believe some of your literary productions as an undergraduate were satires.  You were attracted to this form of [Menippean] satire?

Frye: I was always attracted to that form, because at that time certainly, I knew more about ideas than I did about people.  If someone like Borges had been known to me at the time, I would have tried to pick up that kind of tradition, I think. (Northrop Frye in Conversation, 71)

Saturday Night Video: Exile on Main Street

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lNP-x94-SE

The Rolling Stones recently released a remastered version of their 1972 masterpiece, Exile on Main Street.

The Stones have been around so long — and have ground out so much also-ran material over the past 30 years — that it is easy to forget sometimes why they were once seriously known as “the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band.”  Exile of Main Street is almost certainly their best work that, more than anything by other mainstream artists of the period, deeply explores the musical roots of rock ‘n’ roll, from gospel to blues to soul to country and honky tonk — not to mention at least one track, “Just Wanna See His Face,” that sounds like it burbled up from the depths of a bayou swamp by way of voodoo magic.

Above is the album’s opening track, “Rocks Off”, played over contemporary footage by photographer Robert Frank, who also designed the album’s distinctive cover, as well as shot the notorious, never-released making-of-Exile documentary, Cocksucker Blues.

Before there were music videos, there was Britain’s Top of the Pops.  A couple of  appearances by the band after the jump.

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TGIF: SCTV

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SCTV remains one of the watersheds of television comedy almost 30 years after they called it quits.  They were particularly good at satirizing game shows — sort of paleo-reality television.  Above, “Half Wits”.  After the jump, “Night School High-Q”.

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Troy

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Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, act 2, scenes i and ii

Today is the traditional anniversary of the sack of Troy in 1184 BCE.

Frye on Troy, British national mythology, and Shakespeare in A Natural Perspective:

History is a prominent genre in Shakespeare until Henry V, when it seems to disappear and revive only in the much suspected Henry VIII at the end of the canon.  Yet the history of Britain to Shakespeare’s audience began with the Trojan War, the setting of Troilus and Cressida, and included the story of Lear as well as the story of Macbeth.  Even Hamlet is dimly linked with the period of Danish ascendancy over England.  Alternating with these plays in a Britain older than King John are the Roman or Plutarchan plays, dealing with what, again, to Shakespeare’s audience was the history of a cousin nation, another descendant of Troy.  In Cymbeline the theme of reconciliation between the two Trojan nations is central, as though it were intended to conclude the double series started by Troilus and Cressida.  (66)

Kim and Kelley Deal

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvi4iA3PnKE

Kim Deal and the Pixies, “Here Comes Your Man”

Today is the birthday of the Deal sisters, Kim and Kelley (born 1961).  Yes, yes, this is strictly a personal indulgence.  But if relevance is required, here’s Frye in a 1978 interview responding to a question about the relationship between scholarship and popular culture.

I think that what interest I have in popular culture has largely grown out of my teaching interest.  That is, I have always said that if you’re faced with a reluctant ten-year-old in a classroom and you’re trying to teach him literature and he prefers something he saw on TV the night before, the way to approach him is not to say, “Well this is good for you and that’s bad for you,” but to say, “Look, there are certain resemblances in structure between what I’m trying to give you and what you just saw.”  I think that pedagogically that’s reasonably sound.  That’s really where my interest in popular culture comes from–the fact that it records the same conventions and genres as serious literature, which of course keeps continually growing out of popular roots, just as Shakespeare grew out of the popular theatre.  (CW 24, 422-3)

Saturday Night Video: Music of the Third Wave

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liz

Tina Fey as Liz Lemon drunk dialing while singing “You Oughta Know”

On a recent episode of 30 Rock, Tina Fey‘s sitcom that brings the celebration of geek girl ascendancy into the mainstream, the ring tone on Liz Lemon’s cell phone is revealed to be “Fuck the Pain Away” by Canadian electropunk performance artist Peaches.  It’s such an excellent inside joke that this is probably a good time to remind ourselves why everyone should get it.

Third Wave feminism might not have had the broad cultural impact it has without the wide open music scene of the 90s.  And it arguably was helped along in the previous decade by Madonna, who made sure everybody understood that her sexuality was a source of power, not a cause of subordination.  The music of the Third Wave — with its riot grrrl, queercore, and lo-fi, DIY ethic — has done much to make permeable the barriers on female identity.

After the jump, some milestones in the music that has provided the variables for XX.

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