Feed Your Head

The movie medium began as a series of technical advancements and research projects, an attempt to put still photographs into motion, beginning with Eadweard Muybridge’s “zoopraxiscope” and Thomas Edison’s inventions of the kinetoscope in 1889 and the vitascope in 1895, and quickly moving towards the many imitations and variations that followed.

According to film historian Benjamin B. Hampton, Edison was too involved in his laboratory experiments and “too far removed from the public to realize that his invention was anything more than a toy.” Yet soon, “[M]en with keener commercial sense than Edison. . . saw a field of money-making.”

Altered States, 1980

Although the more artistic possibilities of this new medium would soon reveal themselves through films like George Méliès’ A Trip To The Moon, these seem to have been exceptions to the norm. Hampton notes that although “[T]here was no opposition to quality; there merely was no conscious effort” since the main objectives were that the films “did not require any more film or cost any more money.”

And there was a lot of money to be made. By 1913, the gross income of Edison’s Vitagraph corporation “was between five and six million dollars a year,” a nearly inconceivable amount of money for the time. The battle between art and commerce has continued in the film industry ever since.
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Law & Order: These Are Our Stories

An elderly Jewish man is trying to convince police that he helped his ailing wife commit suicide out of love, but what is the real truth? Is he a devoted husband and Holocaust survivor, or Jacob Schulman, a former Nazi death camp officer trying to cover his tracks?

Screencap by megacaps

In 1996, I turned on my TV, randomly flipped to a channel, and became instantly riveted to the screen by the story just described. Eric Bogosian, who had completely blown my mind in Talk Radio a few years earlier, was portraying an attorney defending the fictional defendant, David Steinmetz, in a New York courtroom. This is how I discovered Law & Order. The episode was called “Night and Fog.”
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The Producers vs. The Product

Adding his voice to the multitudes of musicians clamoring to be heard, Duran Duran’s John Taylor proposed that the Internet is stifling creativity during a speech he gave at UCLA’s 40th Anniversary Of The Internet Symposium.
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Irish Things We Love: Dracula, By Bram Stoker

Ask people to name some Irish things that they love, and they may come up with a list of things that are obviously Irish, like the band U2 or Guinness beer. I would argue though, that our cultural milieu, especially these days, is heavily inspired by the work of an Irish writer, specifically, Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Both Dacre Stoker, great-grandnephew of Bram (and co-author of Dracula: the Un-Dead), and Dennis McIntyre, director of the Bram Stoker’s Dracula Organisation, advance this point of view.
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Confessions Of A Recovering Anglophile

Rupert Everett in Dance With A Stranger, 1985

It wasn’t the Beatles; despite Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and select songs from the White Album, I could hardly tell they had accents. And it wasn’t David Bowie because he wasn’t even from Earth, never mind the UK. I should probably blame Julie Andrews, since it was surely my obsession with The Sound Of Music and Mary Poppins that started it.
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My Problem With Halloween

It’s nearly Halloween, the night when ghosts and ghouls prowl the darkness, when witches and vampire bats scour the sky for victims to spook, and when I reach for a good book to read.
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Why I Love Halloween

One of the best things about living in the greater Toronto area is that, unlike my native New Orleans, there are actually four seasons here instead of “hot and humid” and “slightly less hot and humid.” So when the wind turns cold and scatters fallen leaves throughout the streets, I begin to think of Halloween.

Okay, who am I kidding? I practically think about Halloween every time the thermostat dips into the high teens and a cool breeze blows by. It is by far my favorite holiday.
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I Just Can’t Stop Loving You

The reaction to Michael Jackson’s death surprised me. I can’t pretend to be like the true hardcore Michael fans; I have always hovered on the edges of the fandom and kept it to myself, too much perhaps. For years I have kept quiet about loving him, even as part of a music fandom where coolness doesn’t really matter. There has just been so much wrong with loving him—truly and wholly—in the eyes of the world for so long.
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On Memories And Michael Jackson

It would be absurd to have a magazine devoted to pop culture and fandom and not have something to say about Michael Jackson. The man contributed so much to our culture that we were often unaware of references to him. Upon his death, these references we had seen before somehow became more poignant: a zombie character in a video game wearing a red jacket and walking backwards used to be a funny homage, worthy of a chuckle. Today that same image evokes emotions on top of that, as we realize it as a caricature of a man we never fully understood, even if we did love his work.
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Record Stores Died For Somebody’s Sins (But Not MySpace’s)

Pretty In Pink, 1986
Screencap from Striped Wall

The new millennium has become the Battle of the Social Networking Websites. Which one you prefer depends upon how you utilize each one. As much as Facebook fans may bitch that MySpace is ugly and user-unfriendly, when people want to hear what a band sounds like, they usually go to MySpace.
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