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Music & Fine Art

Songs to Live By: 'Do You Realize??' by The Flaming Lips
Every month, 5AM StoryTalk explores a different song about our struggle to lead good and meaningful lives in a confusing, increasingly grim modern…
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Cole Haddon
15
Songs to Live By: 'Don't Dream It's Over' by Crowded House
Every month, 5AM StoryTalk explores a different song about our struggle to lead good and meaningful lives in a confusing, increasingly grim modern…
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Cole Haddon
36
Where The Love Light Gleams (Or: Christmas as Ritualized Trauma)
'I'll Be Home for Christmas' and similar ballads share a common origin that explains why they're so good at helping us exorcise personal and cultural…
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Cole Haddon
23
What This Statue Teaches Us About Art, Colonialism, and Ourselves
Michael Parekōwhai's 'The English Channel' takes the metaphorical role of the viewer literally - providing a singular master class for all storytellers
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Cole Haddon
10
David Bowie on the Two Biggest Mistakes Artists Make
In a soulful interview from 1997, the rock icon offered some brief, but essential advice about how to create great art
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Cole Haddon
24
Oh No, the Olympics Threw a Big Queer Dinner Party!
What Madonna can teach us about the Paris opening ceremony, the manufactured controversy around it, and many liberals' silly attempts to pretend it…
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Cole Haddon
33
Is 'Diamond Dogs' David Bowie’s Greatest Album?
On its 50th anniversary, let's dissect the icon’s eighth studio album to try to understand what makes it such a work of postmodern rock genius - and…
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Cole Haddon
14
I Want to Break Free (From Your Lies)
From Freddie Mercury to 'M*A*S*H', to Irving Berlin and my own grandfather - a partial, fragmented, and often contradictory history of America's…
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Cole Haddon
21
To Be or Not to Be: 'Ophelia' and (More) Tension of Becoming
A brief examination of John Evert Millais’s iconic 'Hamlet'-inspired painting
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Cole Haddon
How John Denver Helped Me Find My Way Back Home
Music can connect us to each other, through grief and sometimes even across time and space
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Cole Haddon
59
Sam Cooke's 'A Change Is Gonna Come' and the Audacity of Hope
Sixty years after the iconic song's release, its message couldn't feel more naive...or more necessary
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Cole Haddon
19
We're All Made of Horrible, Beautiful Scars
Australian rocker Nick Cave, Native American activist/poet John Trudell, and a 14th-century Japanese shogun have thoughts about how to put ourselves…
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Cole Haddon
30
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