Art, Literature, Music

Let Me Take You Down, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, by Jonathan Cott

Jonathan Cott has a long history with The Beatles, having interviewed them over the years for Rolling Stone. Jonathan interviewed Lennon for nine hours just a few days before he was murdered. This was John Lennon’s last interview.

In this book, Jonathan follows the format which he used in his book about Maurice Sendak. He interviews individuals who will have a particular way of looking at the work in question. In the Sendak book we were looking at Outside Over There. In this book, we are looking at two songs that came out in 1967 and were the two sides of one record. Apparently, there was pressure on the Beatles to get something out before Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band was ready to be released. In Spain. John wrote Strawberry Fields Forever, with its…

Pippin, book by Roger O, Hirson ‘43

I have wanted to read this play for a long time but could only find the music; Roger Hirson wrote the book.  Recently someone posted a PDF of the whole play, and I was happy to have a chance to read the part of the work that was Hirson’s creation.  This alum had a long career writing for TV and movies, but he is best known for Pippin. This successful musical comedy garnered him a Tony nomination. I remember that Friends put on this show in the seventies, and Hirson was nice enough to come to the school to support the production.

Though set in the eighth century AD, the story focuses on the timeless challenge of defining an identity and not on attempting historical accuracy. A commedia del arte style troupe presents the play in a meta theater format.  In the story they…

Frame by Frame A Materialist Aesthetic of Animated Cartoons

by Hannah Frank (early 2000’s?)

A scholarly work about cartoons might seem a bit contradictory, but Hannah approaches the period between 1920 and 1960, when cartoons were hand-drawn, and the period that followed, when Xerography speeded up production, with enormous erudition, originality, and, most of all, patience, The first of these early periods before computer animation took over is referred to as the Golden Age of Animation, when Mickey Mouse, Woody Woodpecker, Felix the Cat, and a host of other characters sprang to life. Her case study for the cartoons of the sixties, when Xerography came into use, is 101 Dalmatians.

As the title states, Hannah looks at the individual pictures (known as cels) frame by frame. Instead of the illusion of motion, Hannah is concerned with a search for artifacts of what was going on when the cels were…

Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity by Sarah F. Derbew.  If you think that scholarship, particularly scholarship of ancient relics and literary works, is dry and tedious, think again.  Sarah Derbew’s journey back and forth through time will acquaint you with, among many other things, clay artifacts from the fifth century BCE and how they relate to museum curation today, The Suppliants, a lesser known play of Aeschylus, and how it relates to the work of twentieth century Martinican writer Franz Fanon, and the role of Aethiopians, a term full of entanglements in itself,  in Herodotus’s Histories and how this role relates to Cavafy’s wonderful poem “Waiting for the Barbarians.” 

You are in for a dizzying ride because Sarah’s purpose is to show how much care we must take when we examine the distant past lest we make the mistake of seeing through the distorting lens of our own time.  The stereotypes and…