Politically packaged, extended-play infomercials (i.e., conventions) make abundant use of music. Partly this has to do with the necessity of cleansing the palate and the ear of the monotone of presidential promotion and the same-old…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Raving about Joe: What if grandad showed up at a rave? You’d probably be smart to dip out of the nearest exit and find your kicks somewhere else that night. Or maybe you could just…
Last Friday night while protesters were being shoved into unmarked vans in Portland by federal paramilitaries, PBS broadcast George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in its Great Performances series. The opera was a strange choice for these times.…
While a White Man President raved in front of dead White Man Presidents in South Dakota, a couple of those same stone faces were re-animated as black men rapping about the Founding of the United…
Born in 1929, the masterful composer Ennio Morricone, who died this week at the age of 91, made his entrance into the world just after the advent of synchronized cinematic sound. The Jazz Singer had…
With all the talk of meddling in U. S. elections and bounties on U.S. soldiers, it’s no small wonder that a Russian named Berlin can still claim to have composed this nation’s best-loved song. Born…
Streaming services have inundated the world’s quarantined population. The rising digital waters have distracted and anesthetized viewers, but also, at times, buoyed and instructed them. It is Netflix that has issued the defining entertainments of…