// Category Archive for: Culture Shock

I Love Those Slags: One Fan Explains Her Obsession With The Mighty Boosh

By Noreen Sobczyk

A few years ago I was ill and staying at my parents’ home in the wonderful land of superfluous cable channels. While stirring around under the covers, feverish, I stumbled upon a British program that was surreal and involved an alternate universe and a cab ride with Death himself, but I could find no information regarding the show. It was so wondrous that I thought it may have been a dream.

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Character Actor In A Movie Star’s Body: Roger Livesey

By Michelle Patterson

Acting isn’t that hard to figure out; either you keep it simple or you make it seem simple without giving away your hand. While I’m not an actor, I do know that as a woman in day-to-day life, I have to be able to become a different woman to different people. This is something we all do; people can tell when we really believe in what we are saying and when we do not. Life is full of performances, which makes it that much easier to decide who is a good actor and who is not. The act itself is invisible and instead of seeing a character, we see a person.
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Thank You PBS For Giving Us The BBC

By Noreen Sobczyk

As a child I often tuned into PBS, where shows like Sesame Street, Electric Company, and Zoom taught me my letters and numbers. However, during the evening hours PBS brought me the wonderful world of the BBC where I learned about the decadence and treachery of history through vehicles like I, Claudius and The Six Wives of Henry VIII. There was also the mind-expanding science fiction of Doctor Who. But the most enduring impact was made by British comedies.
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A Young Person’s Guide To: Powell & Pressburger*

By Chelsea Spear

Who They Are

In the late 1930s, Michael Powell had left banking to study film in the south of France, working his way from lowly production assistant to director of silent films and early talkies. Meanwhile, Emeric Pressburger—a Hungarian émigré—had written screenplays at the legendary Ufa Studio in Germany and in France before settling in London. The pair met as hired hands on Alexander Korda’s 1939 feature Contraband, and spent the following two decades crafting some of the best-loved features to come out of the UK, including The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
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The Orchard Sisters

“After Martha Orchard was found dead on Christmas Eve,
1974, and before it was demolished in 1975,
hundreds of curiousity-seekers visited the house.”
Newspaper clipping courtesy of tufcookie
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Back To The Future II vs. The Real Future

By Laura L.

Many of us have seen the Back To The Future trilogy. And, while watching Back To The Future II, some of us have wondered, “Is that really what things will look like in 2015?” Flying cars, hoverboards, weird-ass sunglasses. . . 2015 is only six years away, and I’m about to break down what the makers of the trilogy, back in 1989 (when the movie was released), thought would happen, as opposed to what will most likely happen.
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The Gonzo Tapes: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

By Lisa Haviland

“For me, it was the first time I’d ever even heard an artillery shell fired and when they come in and hit, it’s a, ah, unnerving experience. . . When you’re out in a jeep that continually backfires and boils over and stops by the side of the road in the midst of voluntary convoys and hoards of refugees, yeah, you tend to think that maybe the world is about to come to an end.”

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New Orleans Is Halloween

By Lisa Haviland

The first time I drove my new-resident ass down Pine Street in 2000, dodgin’ craters, I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell I’d done, even as I knew I belonged in this witchy, subtropic gingerbreadland. Halloween is much better as an ethos, a lifestyle, than a holiday whose significance ebbs with age, and Halloween had manifested in the form of this secret city. Constraints didn’t exist in New Orleans the way they did elsewhere—to where they swallowed you, to where people somberly did their day-to-day and duty trumped joy after all. The thick air vibrated me right out of regular America’s orbit.
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