Agent Palmer

I don’t know if this is the correct takeaway from Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, but it seems to me the “loud hate” minority is much more powerful than the massive “love and let live” majority.

By all accounts, Lilith Fair was an outrageous success. Yes, it took its toll on founder Sarah McLachlan. After all, in three years, it played 134 dates across 54 cities and raised more than $10 million for women’s shelters and non-profits.

Maus is the award-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman. It is a “Survivor’s Tale” specifically, Art’s dad, Vladek, and his survival of the Holocaust.

It is also Art’s story of dealing with his father’s history, legacy, and guilt. It is beautifully crafted in both form and function, in the black-and-white panels, text, and spaces in between.

If you are a regular viewer of this blog, you may be thinking to yourself, “Palmer reviewing a Coupland book about Marshall McLuhan? Hasn’t this already been done before?”

It has! Back in February of 2024, I reviewed Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland. But the thing about reading through an author’s biography is that sometimes they cover a subject more than once.

Beatles ‘64 is a solid documentary. Like many documentaries before it, it frames itself with more stories than just its subject matter.

However, what occurred to me during my viewing was just how rare the footage was, which led to thoughts about how common footage is today.

I can’t recall if I’ve discussed them here before, but I’m the proud owner of a few animation cels in my personal art collection. They’re pieces of a whole and reflections of the things I loved as a kid. Their existence on my walls grows even more special with each year as cels are part of a dying art.

Cel is short for celluloid, which is the transparent sheet on which the “animated” drawings were once painted or drawn on.