Matt Hanson | The Smart Set

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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Rock ‘n’ Roll by Any Other Name

Matt Hanson — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 11:30:00 +0000

John Lennon once said that if you wanted to give rock ’n’ roll another name you might call it Chuck Berry. Far be it from me to disagree with him, but that’s not quite true: There are a few different founding fathers and mothers in the mix. Consider the incendiary flamboyance of Little Richard or […]

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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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The Flipside of a Dream

Matt Hanson — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Alfred Hitchcock was born 124 years ago and has been dead for just over four decades, and we still can’t stop talking about him. He’s a household name with an instantly recognizable profile, and his films are required viewing for both movie nerds and newbies alike. Vertigo was recently voted the greatest film of all […]

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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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Acts of God/Ard

Matt Hanson — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 12:22:00 +0000

We cinephiles tend to be a persnickety bunch. Of course, there’s always the risk of seeming elitist and snobby whenever one enthuses about a film perhaps less known to the general public than, say, an Avengers flick. The venerable Martin Scorsese probably didn’t expect the ensuing hullabaloo when he casually dissed the franchise as “not […]

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100 Years of Charles Mingus

Matt Hanson — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 11:30:00 +0000

At the beginning of his unruly autobiography Beneath the Underdog, Charles Mingus explains himself to an unnamed psychiatrist: “In other words, I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that […]

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Van Ghosts

Matt Hanson — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 15:07:37 +0000

It’s not too much to say that Vincent Van Gogh was haunted from the day he was born. His dour Dutch Protestant parents, his father from a long line of ministers, named him Vincent after the previous child who had eerily died exactly a year before the painter’s birth on March 30, 1853. Born as […]

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Like the “Roadrunner”

Matt Hanson — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 11:30:00 +0000

When you get right down to it, so much of rock and roll (and pop music in general) is about fantasy. Imagining how the good life sounds, feels differently when you’re listening to a rock band. Let’s be real; you will probably never approach the hedonistic apex of, say, Led Zeppelin or KISS and if […]

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