Tag: Collaboration

Posted on

The Next Chapter of Culture on the Edge: New Collaborations

At Culture on the Edge, we’d like to think that one of our strengths is our academic diversity. While many from our original group have come from some area of the study of religion, we have a variety of areas of specialization — from Greece, to India, to the United States, from ancient history, academic discourse, and gender, to religious identifications, music, and literature. These many areas of specialization have prompted challenging and constructive conversations as we have grappled with issues in the study of identification. As we welcomed guest bloggers aboard (in what we’ve called “Chapter 2” of the blog), we’ve seen even more new perspectives added to this ongoing and ever-evolving study. Continue reading “The Next Chapter of Culture on the Edge: New Collaborations”

Posted on

“How do I pronounce it again?”

The Search For General TSOAt least here in North American, it’s likely you’ve had General Tso’s Chicken if you’ve got to a Chinese restaurant. (And fortune cookies, of course.)

chicken and broccoli on a dishBut who was General Tso? Did he really like chicken? And where’d the dish come from?

This new documentary would be really useful in classes interested in tackling just what it means to assume something is authentic or, better yet, to exemplify how identity is, in fact, a public and always ongoing collaborative exercise — in this case, between cooks, armed with certain sorts of recipes, and eaters, who arrive at their restaurants with very different tastes.

Posted on

“The Star-Maker Machinery Behind the Popular Song”

A black and white photo of a man and a woman playing the guitarLike the recent documentary on the largely unknown session musicians associated with recording studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a group that produced the sound associated with much popular music from the 1960s on, there’s an equally interesting 2008 documentary on a group of equally unknown LA-based musicians who appeared on countless albums, dating from the early years of rock and roll, but who also performed on a wide variety of other albums, movie scores, and TV themes songs.

Like the late, famed studio musician Tommy Tedesco (pictured above, with Carol Kaye) who played (among the many other well known songs) the iconic theme from this classic TV show:

Continue reading ““The Star-Maker Machinery Behind the Popular Song””

Posted on

Everybody Plays the Fool

collaborate

When [Walter] Kirn was just starting his novel-writing career, he met a man who was a bold financier, an art collector, a fussy eccentric, a dog lover and a Rockefeller. They became friends.

But over the years Kirn began to learn that the man who called himself Clark Rockefeller was none of that — not even a dog lover. He was a psychopath and a killer.

How did Kirn fall for the fraud? Was Christian Karl Gerhartsriter — aka “Clark Rockefeller” — extraordinarily compelling? Or was the novelist, like a lot of other people drawn to the imposter, duped by his own desire to have an attachment to a famous name?

So opens a radio story on the curious case of Clark Rockefeller — or, might we say instead, the curious case of people, such as Kirn himself, who believed his friend to be the man he claimed to be. The difference between how we approach this story — is it about Rockefeller (pictured above) or Kirn? — tells us much about the social theory used to tell the tale. Continue reading “Everybody Plays the Fool”