Harry's Place Arts

This is a cross post from For All and None, my occasional blog for more off-beat topics: Thomas JJ Altizer is, for me, the one truly fascinating theologian of the 20th Century, and remains today the one theologian whose vision and writings continue to captivate me, in spite of my complete unbelief. Altizer found himself [...]

Last week National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program featured a segment about a couple of guys who have spent years collecting old Jewish musical and spoken-word vinyl LPs from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and have written a book about them. I’m sure their collection includes several albums by Mickey Katz. Katz was a [...]

Having read Hitchens on the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, I then had another go at the novel, which I used to think over-written and absurd. I was especially uncharmed by the winsome Sebastian and his teddy bear.  Evelyn Waugh’s prose is economic as a rule, sometimes to the point of sketchiness; in Brideshead Revisited [...]

Can I draw your attention, dear HP readers, to Liverpool’s wonderful Swine Magazine – a worthy online successor to irreverent ‘zines like The End and Boys Own.  Whatever your opinion of football hooliganism (and as a workshy bourgeois southern fop with no real interest in football let alone fighting, I’m at very best ambivalent towards [...]

Mr Brett and I are spending the day cataloguing our mountain of rock music books. Quite by chance, we found this paragraph in a 1964 Penguin Paperback called “Love Me Do: The Beatles Progress” by Michael Braun. In the introduction, it has a quite bizarre quote from the Daily Mirror (which, the book says, has “the biggest circulation [...]