60x50
Saturday, January 23, 2010

High Fidelity

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The long-playing (“LP”) microgroove record, what is commonly referred to as the vinyl LP, which in its final form held about 20 minutes of m...
Friday, January 22, 2010

Portability

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Historian David Morton indicates in Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (2000) that the first signific...
Monday, January 18, 2010

Spindrift

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There’s an old saw that avers suffering transforms the common man into a philosopher, and this may express a certain truth. In one of her po...
Sunday, January 17, 2010

Pastiche

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According to John Tobler’s This Day In Rock (Carroll & Graf, 1993), Led Zeppelin’s first album (cover pictured) was released 41 years a...
Friday, January 15, 2010

Wild Civility

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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...
Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Auteurism

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French filmmaker Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) has died, at age 89, and has been widely written about and eulogized, even by commentators who obvi...
Sunday, January 10, 2010

Hey! Ho! Let's Go!

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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...
Friday, January 8, 2010

The Ghost Has Left The Building

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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...
Thursday, January 7, 2010

Behold! A Plucked Chicken

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According to legend, at the point when Aristotle and his students had refined their definition of “man” to a creature having the qualities o...
Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Cool Sounds

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The weather outside is frightful—“bone-chilling,” as the saying goes, in order to suggest, I suppose, the coldness of the grave. Hence, give...
Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Thoughts On Year Two

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Yesterday represented the second anniversary of 60x50 . As of yesterday, I have posted 395 entries on this blog, which averages out to about...
Saturday, January 2, 2010

Devil’s Dictionary of Pop I

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