In Medias Res: Friday Morning Videos

Showing posts with label Friday Morning Videos. Show all posts

Friday, January 20, 2017

Friday Mid-Morning Inauguration Day Video: "The End of the Innocence"

For today, for many reasons. Most sad--but some, perhaps, a little bit hopeful. Just remember what Dr. Manhattan said: "Nothing ever ends." We get up, we get busy living, we keep on keeping one. Always.

Friday, December 30, 2011

The Very Last Friday Morning Videos: "Closing Time"

Well everyone, this is it: for 2011, for this most recent excursion through one-hit-wonderism, but also for Friday Morning Videos as a whole. It's closing time, in other words. I've been running this feature for over three years, and--allowing for the occasional double-posting, but also a few repeats--I've probably posted over 150 videos in that time, nearly all of them from different artists. (No, I'm not going to go back through and check.) I'd say that amounts to a pretty decent accomplishment--but whether it is or not, I think it's time to close shop, and go on to something new. My apologies to all thirteen or so readers out there who have come to depend upon my weekly servings of mid-70s through mid-90s pop, but I'm sure you'll be able to satiate your addictions somehow. And besides, check back every once in a while; I may not put up videos regularly any longer, but I'll never get them entirely out of my soul, I'm sure. Anyway, thanks for watching, and happy almost new year!

Friday, December 23, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Driving Home for Christmas"

Chris Rea has had a far larger career in Europe and his home base in the UK than he ever managed in the US; over here he's a genuine one-hit-wonder-maker, with his wonderful "Fool (If You Think It's Over)" from over 30 years ago. But this fine Christmas tune of his has made the charts twice in Great Britain, and I kind of like its reflective, whimsical sound this season. This video was made the second time the song charted in England, for use by the charity Shelter, and stars a bunch of British television stars and personalities, only one of which I can identify, I think. Seems like they all had a good time, though. Anyway, Merry Christmas--and if you're traveling, drive safely!

Friday, December 16, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Stay"

I truly, genuinely believed it was Helena Bonham-Carter playing the Crazy-Death-Spirit-Seducer-Woman the first time I saw this one-hit wonder. I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

Friday, December 09, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Shattered Dreams"

I like actually like jazz, Johnny, but whatever. (Oh come on, someone had to make the joke, you know?)

And the art deco American version...

Friday, December 02, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "The Politics of Dancing"

Who doesn't miss the Cold War's aesthetic? You know I do.

Not the sort of politics I normally teach, though not for lack of trying. (I wonder how much they had to pay the kids from the local roller-skate rink to come and wheel around for an hour?)

Friday, November 25, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "What About Me?"

Yeah, what about me? There's not even a single turkey wing left? Oh man.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Too Shy"

Kajagoogoo, present!

A fun song, but it you think Limahl's deserves even more attention, there's this. (I should have fit that into my Summer Soundtrack FMV series.)

Friday, November 11, 2011

Special 11/11/11 Double Friday Morning Videos: "Goodnight Saigon" and "Hell Hole"

A brief respite from one-hit-wonderism this morning, in honor of both Armistice/Remembrance/Veterans Day, as well as the pressing need we all have, sometimes, to take it up to 11.

I'll leave it up to you to decide which video goes with which occasion.

Friday, November 04, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Turning Japanese"

On the basis of the past couple of weeks, I appear to have fallen into a bit of one-hit-wonderism. So how about I keep that up, hmm?

(Also, for old SCTV fans, there's this.)

Friday, October 28, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Life in a Northern Town"

Scotland, northern England--it's all good. With Halloween around the corner, and fall having finally begun around here--it was actually a little chilly a couple of mornings ago!--well, after our exhaustingly hot summer, a little cool weather melancholy fits my mood quite well.

And just because it's awesome, version two:

I actually can't remember which of these two versions I remember seeing first when I was 16. And I had no idea who Dream Academy was singing about; I wouldn't learn about Nick Drake until another decade or two had gone by. Sad, but true. The things you miss out on...

Friday, October 21, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Big Country"

There are some faculty members planning a trip to Scotland. Who wouldn't want to go with them? I sure would.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Red Red Wine"

Before you say anything, yes, you're correct: I can't relate to this song at all. Can't relate to most ska or reggae or punk songs, for that matter. Still like them though.

Friday, October 07, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Mirror in the Bathroom"

Okay, if I'm talking ska, I can't ignore this one.

Friday, September 30, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Someday I Suppose"

Now this early-90s bit of ska-punk really takes me back. Utah Valley, the home of Provo and BYU, was bizarrely also the location of a pretty serious ska scene back during my undergraduate years, with fine local bands (Swim Herschel Swim, Stretch Armstrong, tour appearances by some great contemporary acts (the Crazy 8s, in particular), and even major reunion tours (The Skatalites, Special Beat) stopping by. It was pretty intense, if you got into that stuff...and Melissa and I certainly did.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Sabotage"

Also not quite punk. But who cares? The Beastie Boys started out that way, after all.

I want to be Sir Stewart Wallace.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Tubthumping"

I think this may the most recent video I've ever posted on this feature--it's not even 15 years old! Nor is it especially punk. But it has a bit of that spirit, I think.

Friday, September 09, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "London Calling"

Keeping up with the punk theme. Sure can't hurt (though I think it's supposed to).

Friday, September 02, 2011

Friday Morning Videos: "Rise"

My friend Dan Weingarten reminded me of this kick-ass tune a few weeks ago, and it put me in a very punk mood. Not a bad mood to be in these days.

I never even knew this song had a video. Maybe it Johnny Rotten was just too controversial for NBC?

Friday, August 26, 2011

Summer Soundtrack Friday Morning Videos: "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough"

It's pretty much impossible to describe what a ridiculous, embarrassing, borderline offensive mess this monstrous video is, so I'll just let you watch all 13 minutes of it, and then I'll call it quits for this feature. Classes started this week, anyway; high time I got back to normal around here. But first, part 1:

And now, part 2 (yes, the music is essentially the same in both videos; I don't know what they meant to accomplish in doing that):

I read somewhere that Cyndi Lauper actually hates this song. Oh well.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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