New Books in Popular Culture

In the second episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with Tony Zanetta. In the late 1960s, Zanetta worked in Off-Off-Broadway theater and ultimately landed a role playing the Andy Warhol character in Pork, an absurdist play based on Warhol’s phone recordings. Zanetta followed the cast to London where he befriended David Bowie who subsequently appointed him president of his management company, Main Man, and Bowie’s direct point of contact in America for the Ziggy Stardust tour (1972).With his involvement with Bowie, Zanetta was responsible for developing acts under the Main Man umbrella. This included a proto-punk band called Queen Elizabeth fronted by Jayne (formerly Wayne) County. With Bowie’s financial backing, Zanetta produced a gender-bending spectacle of drag, sex, and rock ’n’ roll: Wayne County at the Trucks! (1974). It may be the most spectacular rock show you have never heard of … till now.Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In the premiere episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with celebrated writer Lucy Sante about the landscape of gender logics within the New York rock scene. It was a nebulous soundscape of counterculture formed around gender explorations and social upheaval set to the soundtrack of an aggressive style of rock ’n’ roll that critics would identify as punk rock by the end of the seventies.  Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy Award (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after twenty-four years of teaching at Bard College. Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In this thought-provoking discussion, Todd May, a seasoned philosopher and consultant for the acclaimed series The Good Place, dives into the moral complexities surrounding humanity's existence. He challenges listeners to consider whether the world would be better off without us, weighing the unique values humans bring—like art and community—against the suffering we inflict on nature. May eloquently explores our collective agency, the ethics of procreation, and the implications of possible population reduction as a means to mitigate ecological harm.

Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, researching new workplace organizing, strikes, digital labor activism, and working-class politics. He is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (Verso 2019) and his writings have appeared in journals such as Politics & Society, New Labor Forum, and Labor Studies Journal as well as publications such as The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin. A longtime labor activist, Blanc is an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which he helped co-found in March 2020. He directs The Worker to Worker Collaborative, a center to help unions and rank-and-file groups scale up their efforts by expanding their members’ involvement and leadership. For more information about organizing your workplace and the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee you can click here: https://workerorganizing.org/ You can read more by Eric Blanc at https://www.laborpolitics.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Johanna Drucker, an acclaimed author and cultural critic, dives into the intricate web of consumer culture in her latest discussions. She presents 'Affluvia,' a concept addressing the hidden toxic effects of affluent lifestyles. The conversation explores the ecological costs of daily routines, like coffee-making and pet care, revealing their connections to global supply chains and environmental degradation. Drucker also challenges societal norms, advocating for modest living and sustainability while shedding light on the invisible systems that support affluence.

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we analyze the movie Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan, just released on streaming. We address the political themes of the movie, focusing on its generic identity as a Southern Gothic, the historical context in which the movie takes place, its engagement with ideas of utopia, community, freedom, and the siren songs that often lead communities down false roads in search of these goals. We appreciate the aesthetic achievement of the movie, which is perhaps Director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan's best and most complete work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Michelle Phillipov's Digital Food TV: The Cultural Place of Food in a Digital Era (Routledge, 2023) explores the new theoretical and political questions raised by food TV’s digital transformation. Bringing together analyses of food media texts and platform infrastructures—from streaming and catch-up TV to YouTube and Facebook food videos—it shows how new textual conventions, algorithmic practices, and market logics have redrawn the boundaries of food TV and altered the cultural place of food, and food media, in a digital era. With case studies of new and rerun television and emerging online genres, Digital Food TV considers what food television means at the current moment—a time when on-screen digital content is rapidly proliferating and televisual platforms and technologies are undergoing significant change. This book will appeal to students and scholars of food studies, television studies, and digital media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

American Gangster (2007) is Ridley Scott’s homage to The French Connection: it’s got the right cars, clothes, and colors and is based on another true story of an obsessed cop trying to take down a drug kingpin. The feature (or the bug, depending on how you look at it) is Denzel Washington in the title role. Is an actor so charismatic that everyone talks as if they are on a first-name basis with him actually a liability in a movie that wants to tell a story of a large-scale heroin dealer who, in the movie’s first scene, burns a man alive? Can an actor’s star power ever backfire? John McCarty’s Bullets Over Hollywood (Grand Central Publishing, 2005) traces the gangster film and explores the enduring appeal of the genre. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In this exhilarating journey into underground parties, pulsating with life and limitless possibility, acclaimed author Amin Ghaziani unveils the unexpected revolution revitalizing urban nightlife. Drawing on Ghaziani's immersive encounters at underground parties in London and more than one hundred riveting interviews with everyone from bar owners to party producers, revelers to rabble-rousers, Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2024) showcases a spectacular, if seldom-seen, vision of a queer world shimmering with self-empowerment, inventiveness, and joy. Amin Ghaziani is Professor of Sociology who has taught at Northwestern, Princeton, University of British Columbia, and UC Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Michael Broyles examines a wide variety of musical, technological, and social currents that helped to shape American music in Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades that Changed a Country and Its Sounds (Norton, 2024), but he accomplishes this by focusing on just thirty years. Broyles discusses three pivotal decades in US musical history: the 1840s, the 1920s, and the 1950s. He argues that these decades fundamentally remade the American cultural landscape in enduring ways. Although Revolutions in American Music describes the ruptures caused by new musical and technological innovations such as the development of jazz or rock 'n roll, Broyles also revisits deep cultural and social fissures that affected America and American music in all three time periods. Throughout the book, Broyles introduces important figures who have been overlooked and tells stories that illuminate the messy, complex, sometimes dark, but always fascinating history of music in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture