The soundtrack to the film Pretty Woman (1990) contains Christopher Otcasek’s cover version of Johnny O’Keefe’s 1958 hit, “The Wild One” in...

French filmmaker Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) has died, at age 89, and has been widely written about and eulogized, even by commentators who obvi...

Songs with nonsense syllables serve to remind us that American music since the jazz era always has been more a matter of sound than sense—sc...

Were he alive today, this would have been the human Elvis Presley’s 75th birthday. The story is quite familiar: he was born in 1935 to paren...

According to legend, at the point when Aristotle and his students had refined their definition of “man” to a creature having the qualities o...

The weather outside is frightful—“bone-chilling,” as the saying goes, in order to suggest, I suppose, the coldness of the grave. Hence, give...

Yesterday represented the second anniversary of 60x50 . As of yesterday, I have posted 395 entries on this blog, which averages out to about...

A short list of caustic aphorisms inspired by Ambrose Bierce (pictured), who wrote the first Devil’s Dictionary (1911). British Invasion ...

Roughly every four weeks, or about every twenty-eight days, a full moon rises, which normally means there are twelve full moons a year. But ...

So asks the singer of this venerable Frank Loesser tune, covered many times over the years, but first recorded by Kay Kyser and His Orchest...

There is a famous quotation attributed to Albert Schweitzer, “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” If y...

There’s an old rule of thumb in the film business, “Never take your name off a film.” The reason behind this adage is simple: If the film tu...