Like all people not wholly destitute of heart, when I hear the opening of “ABC” by the Jackson 5 I experience the familiar jolt of pop elation – that swift giddiness of spirit that comes of being in company with a human thing that is also so pure a distillation of joyousness. This was true…
On a late-spring day sometime in the mid-90s, I found myself sitting with a friend on a stone bench overlooking a prospect of conventional, but nevertheless pretty estimable, pastoral loveliness: green valley and distant hills, cinematic cloudscapes, placid lake, etc. The friend with whom I sat was just then at the collapsing end of a…
You don’t have to be driving around with a 15-year-old on her first-ever trip to California to fall abruptly, defenselessly in love with “Call Me Maybe.” (Yes that bit of mass-cultural ubiquity, the song to which for the rest of human time lazy producers of VH-1ish “documentaries” will turn when they need to signify, swiftly and…