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American Epic

Documentary debuting this evening on PBS — the trailer here. AMERICAN EPIC represents a ten-year odyssey by Allison McGourty, director Bernard MacMahon, musician Duke Erikson, and audio engineer Nicholas Bergh, that involved tracking down countless long forgotten musicians, restoring the music that they recorded and reassembling the technology that created it. Along the way they brought…

Walker Percy Wednesday 136

The signal-using organism has an environment. The sign-user has an environment, but it also has a world. The environment of an organism is those elements of the Cosmos which affect the organism significantly (Saturn does not) and to which the organism either is genetically coded to respond or has learned to respond. There are many…

Wrong Is Right

This really was a thoroughly crap film back in the day and though it hasn’t improved with age, I guess it was onto something (well at least the novel on which it was based). Here is Joe Dante making a case for the film to be reassessed, at least on the grounds of its prescience. Here too is…

Brentano, Kafka and Hayek

While working on a Barry Smith related project I was reminded of two fascinating papers by this incredibly productive, eclectic and just downright decent and responsive bloke whose work in ontology has had real and positive practical import for medical science. As you might be aware, many philosophers these days are in the business of self-aggrandizement, “activism posing as…

Life + Death: Chairmen of the Board

A classic bit of acid funk to blow away the past week, a world away from “Give Me Just A Little More Time”. As per usual AllMusic gets it. Here are a couple of obits for General Johnson in The Guardian and The New York Times. acid funkacid soulchairmen of the boardgeneral johnsonmusicpsychedelic funk

John Oliver as Ben Elton

Glad I’m not the only one to realize that North Americans are oblivious to the fact that John Oliver is really a “mini-me” Ben Elton, but without the talent, even though I thought, in the day, Elton as a stand-up, was tiresome. This said, I concede we needed a foil like BE. BE was a superb writer…