My Current Favorite Pop Song is a Monorhyme

Ah, how strange it is to be a middle-aged English major. Here I am, at fifty-five (an age matching the speed at which Sammy Hagar, famously, can’t drive), and my favorite song of late is by an Indie Pop band of millennials, Echosmith.

I’ve liked Echosmith ever since I heard their breakthrough hit, “Cool Kids,” which had a dreamy, melancholic feel that I found moving—a dirge masquerading as a pop song. My current obsession is their later hit, “Tell Her You Love Her,” which has a similar vibe.

It is also, as any English or Lit major would realize, a monorhyme. That is, a poem in which every line ends with same rhyming sound. Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is probably the most famous example (unless it’s The Police’s “Every Breath You Take”; I’ll leave it to you to decide).

Anyway, enjoy…

Author’s Note: Bakhtin’s Cigarettes has moved!!! That is, I’ve relocated to my new blog/website, ashcliftonwriter.com. Same witty, intelligent, and humble content; different url.

Perfect Films: “Altered States”

R.I.P. William Hurt

One of our greatest actors has passed away, and too soon.

William Hurt was a highly unusual actor in that, with every role, he seemed to radiate a deep and inscrutable intelligence. The typical Hurt character was, therefore, both off-putting and magnetic at the same time. The was especially true of his first movie—one of my absolute favorites—to which I wrote a tribute a few years back.
Here it is…

Bakhtin's Cigarettes

I did not grow up in the 1960s, and I can’t claim any special knowledge of the magical and tumultuous period of American culture. However, I did grow up in the 1970s, when there was still just a faint afterglow of that glorious time. I vividly remember that day in 1975 when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army, and thus ended the most divisive and catastrophic the U.S. has ever fought. I also remember the election of Ronald Reagan, which finished, once for all, the last vestiges of what was once called the counterculture—that semi-revolutionary, underground movement characterized by sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. (Especially the drugs.)

I remember, in fact, some of my parents’ friends, who were obviously adherents to this so-called counterculture. They wore cool clothes (lots of paisley), drank run-and-cokes, and laughed at everything, as if they were seeing a different world through their bloodshot…

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