I still haven't had a chance to view the full doc yet, but I'll be playing bands featured in it on my radio show tonight on WMBR: Last Dance at the Death Disco. John Foxx, Ultravox, and Gary Numan, and The Normal of course, but also bands that were also influenced by the writer, but might not have been in the doc (again -- haven't seen it yet): Human League, Heaven 17, Cabaret Voltaire, The Associates, Comsat Angels and many more. Check out the website and listen to the live stream tonight at 10PM: http://deathdisco.fm http://wmbr.org ]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/synth_britannia.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/synth_britannia.html Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:17:56 -0500 reports today, a British writer and analyst, Charles Leadbeater, and a co-author and researcher, Annika Wong, decided to find out exactly how large that role was. The pair made use of data provided by a "media analytics" company called Sysomos. Leadbeater and Wong's conclusion? Twitter's role was negligible. It had to be negligible, in fact, given that a mere .027 percent of Iranians have registered to use the social-networking service.]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/step_away_from.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/step_away_from.html Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:55:38 -0500 review of Danner's "Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War" was respectful of Danner but highly critical of the book. For context, that's 81 words longer than James Parker's cover review this week of the latest Stephen King novel. Danner's letter is fully four-fifth's the length of Packer's original review.]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/look_whos_got_j.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/look_whos_got_j.html Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:19:23 -0500 Would PBS ever greenlight something as interesting and non-Ken-Burns-y as "Synth Britannia," to which BBC viewers were recently treated? The documentary is described on the BBC website as site as "following a generation of post-punk musicians who took the synthesiser from the experimental fringes to the centre of the pop stage." Were Pete Townsend and Brian Eno, who predate the musicians profiled, really "the experimental fringes"? In any case, the BBC says that the Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan moment for synthesizer-driven music came in 1979, when Gary Numan appeared on the British show Top of the Pops. Numan's best-known song in the United States is "Cars," which brings us to one of the themes of the documentary: the link between synth-pop and the work of the English writer J.G. Ballard, known for his dystopian ruminations on modern life, most famously in the novel "Crash." http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/jg_ballard.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/jg_ballard.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:07:31 -0500 debate the new Harvard University Press reference work: After warming up, Bauerlein comes to his main point:

The old Master Narratives and Concepts have no place either--American Adam, Symbolism, and American Literature, etc.--except for one. It resounds in the beginning, where the editors explain why entries proliferate after the Civil War: They note that "the story of the United States becomes a story of previously disenfranchised, despised, degraded, excluded, enslaved, brutalized, and even unspeakable Americans claiming their place as full citizens, demanding not only the right to speak but the right to be heard, remaking the country as surely as any before them, and, in novels, poems, paintings, speeches, and acts, judging it as it had never been judged before." That angle, emotional and partisan as it is, calls for judgment. It seems to me a loaded approach, overemphasizing the victims, conceived in resentment, aggrandizing one kind of American experience and excluding others from the story. With two-thirds of the volume following the disenfranchised-franchised pattern, this isn't a literary history of America. It's a drama of multiculturalist emergence.

]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/more_on_harvard.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/more_on_harvard.html Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:08:18 -0500 states:

The emphasis on memoir is so strong that autobiography, history and fiction may be endangered. And the reasons for memoir's popularity may rest in our very nature as Americans: In a land where the majority rules, individuality is exalted and memoir is more befitting the American ideal of resourcefulness. "When it comes to proving points and making cases, fiction's day is done," Yagoda says.

I can't decide whether Yagoda or his profiler is the more egregious hyperbolist, but Yagoda has the excuse of flogging a book.]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/literary_overst.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/literary_overst.html Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:21:01 -0500 her web site, Bartoli has stressed the grim and tragic aspects of the castrati phenomenon. Some classical critics have challenged her claim that, during the Baroque period, Italy alone was castrating 3,000 to 4,000 boys a year for artistic purposes, but, regardless of the figure, many were mutilated and only a few became superstars. And being a castrated superstar was surely not a psychologically unfraught experience, either. The photographs of Bartoli commissioned to accompany "Sacrificium" are as striking as the music on the CD.]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/the_sacrifice_o.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/the_sacrifice_o.html Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:27:17 -0500 a 1963 essay, published in the New York Review of Books, that helped to broaden his reputation. It later appeared, in expanded form, as "The Anthropologist as Hero," in her collection "Against Interpretation." Lévi-Strauss, Sontag wrote, was prototypically modern in that he had responded to the alienating aspects of contemporary life--its accelerating speed, its homogeneity--by immersing himself its opposite: the exotic, the hyperlocal, the "primitive." ]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/claude_levistra.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/claude_levistra.html Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:43:40 -0500 a piece that two younger colleagues had just turned in the second-worst piece of dreck he'd read in four-plus decades at the newspaper. One of the recipients of this insult, a young feature writer, took umbrage and his rebuttal included a vulgarity. Allen counter-rebutted with his fists. The paper's top editor, Marcus Brauchli, was among those who broke up the quite serious scrum. Today, Gene Weingarten, the Post's humor columnist, weighs in, writing: "Hooray." In these days of fiscal worry and editorial overcautiousness, he writes, he's glad that some writers and editors, at least, still have passion for their work, and high standards. Which brings us to that question lingering in the air: what was the worst story Allen ever read? ]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/echoes_of_the_g.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/echoes_of_the_g.html Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:10:40 -0500 "Dylan roots theory," which he calls "famous, to me at least":

Whenever Dylan did something artistically egregious, in poor taste, inept, schlocky, or otherwise incompatible with his reputation for genius, the reviewers would explain that he was a kind of musicologist, plumbing the roots of Americana, absorbing within himself the variegated traditions of our native music and transmuting them into art uniquely his own.

]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/havent_heard_th.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/havent_heard_th.html Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:57:37 -0500 seem to be doing okay--you could do worse than read Louis Menand's piece in the latest issue of Harvard Magazine. It's adapted from his forthcoming book, "The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University" (Norton). Menand notes that the post-war growth in Ph.D. programs created, by 1975, an oversupply of humanities professors. Yet the problems are worse, or at least weirder, than a mere mismatch of supply and demand would suggest.]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/louis_menand_on.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/louis_menand_on.html Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:06:48 -0500 runs through some genre possibilities for his next book, with a capsule summary of the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative: magical realism, the thriller, the book that "holds a mirror up to our society," and so on. Some of these entries just might get other writers spitting mad: ]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/colson_whitehea.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/11/colson_whitehea.html Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:48:33 -0500 those still exist?) ...]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/10/print_publicati.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/10/print_publicati.html Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:02:38 -0500 make the case for retaining and maintaining small-yield nuclear weapons that could be deployed in scenarios falling well short of Armageddon. If Iran, for example, used nuclear weapons to destroy a U.S. carrier fleet or other essentially military target (an Army base far from civilian centers, say), and the U.S. had in its arsenal only high-yield bombs, the two scholars write, it would find its hands tied. The world would see the destruction of Tehran as a disproportionate response. And a president might, not unreasonably, be unwilling to sanction the wholesale slaughter of civilians. Small-to-medium-size atomic weapons that could take out foreign militaries and weapons systems while keeping civilian slaughter to a minimum (or "minimum") are therefore essential to a credible defense, Lieber and Press argue.]]> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/10/nukes_you_can_u.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2009/10/nukes_you_can_u.html Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:58:08 -0500