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The Successful Gesture

Matt Hanson — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

There’s a line in The Great Gatsby that took me by surprise when I first read it in high school, and I’ve been puzzling over it ever since. Early on, the fictional narrator Nick Carraway is thinking about what makes Gatsby special. He wonders “if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures” which seemed […]

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A Century of Hank Williams

Matt Hanson — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 11:30:00 +0000

In his wry, self-deprecating “Tower of Song” Leonard Cohen reflects on his legacy and his place within the grand tradition of songwriters. “I asked Hank Williams how lonely does it get/ Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet/ but I hear him coughing/ all night long/ a hundred floors above me in the tower of song.” It’s […]

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Print the Legend

Matt Hanson — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 10:57:06 +0000

A few years ago, I had to assemble a syllabus for a writing class. I added John Ford’s 1962 black and white western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I don’t quite remember why, and I was worried how it would go over. Thankfully the first class discussion went much better than expected and the […]

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Tom Verlaine

Matt Hanson — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:36:34 +0000

To my rue, I wasn’t very adventurous in High School. My rebellions and transgressions tended to be mostly internal, generally taking the form of skipping gym class to go to the library. It felt a little extra wicked to discard my homework and dive into back copies of Rolling Stone and anthologies of rock criticism. […]

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Miles and Me

Matthew Duffus — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 14:35:18 +0000

I’m embarrassed to admit that as a middle school trumpet player, I didn’t think much of Miles Davis. Living in the music desert of western Maryland, I had access to chain stores, disc jockeys, and Camelot, but they carried whatever was popular, not necessarily what was good. Both were more likely to sell Kenny G […]

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Singing to the Melody of Capital

Fouad Mami — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 11:30:00 +0000

Intrinsically, icons are neither revolutionary nor counterrevolutionary. Individual icons lend themselves to different interpretations — and any number of political causes. Nevertheless, when considering their capacity for synthesizing choices and galvanizing revolutionary action, icons become controversial. In short, beneath the use of icons, there exists a class dimension that the powers that be — particularly […]

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