Pop Culture
HISTORY OF HAMILTON – THE MUSICAL Hamilton – The Musical, how accurate historically is the recent Broadway blockbuster, currently available on Disney+ TV? It’s based on the 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, but does Hamilton – The Musical compare favorably to the actual history? The Set-Up As an aficionado of musical theatre…
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HISTORY OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE — 1967: PART 4, ROCK & ROLL It was twenty years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play They’ve been going in and out of style But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile Rock & roll in the ’60s was exemplified when The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s…
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HISTORY OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE — 1967: DRUGS When I was a Resident Assistant at Berkeley in the early ’70s, a local police officer I knew gave me a tour down Telegraph Avenue. He told me: “All the major drug deals on the West Coast go down within a two-block stretch of Telegraph Avenue.…
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HISTORY OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE — 1967: PART 2, SEX “Make love, not war,” and the call for “free love” represented a cultural shift in mores. Even The Beatles sang that “All You Need Is Love.” If the ’60s was the time of the “sexual revolution,” the natural question is: who won? There were…
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HISTORY OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE — 1967: SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK & ROLL The Summer of Love was fifty-three years ago, the Summer of 1967, with its epicenter in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. It was a summer of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Both San Francisco and Liverpool celebrated it in 1997. While…
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HISTORY OF ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE On June 25, 1967, The Beatles released the song “All You Need Is Love.” At that time, they participated in the Our World TV show, which used the recently constructed satellite system and broadcast their performance across the globe. Beatles drummer Ringo Starr said later, “It was the…
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HISTORY OF THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE This week we celebrate the 83rd anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. On May 27, 1937, the bridge opened to traffic after taking over five years to build. I remember asking my father when I was young: “Why isn’t the Golden Gate Bridge golden?” He didn’t…
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HISTORY OF STAR WARS The original Star Wars movie premiered on May 25, 1977. In 1976 I picked up a new science fiction novel called “Star Wars” by George Lucas. I did not know at the time that it was ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, a popular sci-fi writer. The following May, the movie debuted…
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HISTORY OF THE WHO’s TOMMY Fifty-one years ago today, on May 23, 1969, the British rock group The Who released the double-album rock opera, Tommy. Commercially the record went Gold in the UK and Double Platinum in the US. Several of the songs were released as singles that charted in the Top 20 in both…
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