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Stop! Look! Listen!

Stop! Look! Listen!

Stop! Look! Listen! is your one-stop destination for The Fiddlehead's cultural engagement.

Stop! Look! Listen! Lisa Russ Spaar's Movie Recommendation

Posted on July 18, 2023

I always assume that everyone has seen the classic cult film Harold and Maude, featuring iconic performances by Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort and a fabulous soundtrack by the young Cat Stevens.  But when I mention the film now to my students, often no one in the room has even heard of the movie, let alone watched it.  It is a unique and unparalleled love story that is very much of its time and place (California at the start of the 70s—Vietnam, ecology, weed, all manner of cultural and social revolution) but is very

Stop! Look! Listen! Ronna Bloom's Book Recommendation

Posted on July 12, 2023

Phil Hall’s new book, The Ash Bell, undoes me. His work makes me read below the below and out the corners of my eyes. Drops me down under understanding, echos of words like backlit other words waving their fronds. I read the word “worship" and see “warship." It's blunt, raw, funny and true. Cumulative. I do not understand, I stand under, happily. 

Stop! Look! Listen! Dawn MacDonald's Book Recommendation

Posted on July 5, 2023

The literary lives of us rural folks can be overly shaped by whatever happened to be available at our local library, or that one random anthology we found in a "free books" pile. I was extremely fortunate to have that anthology be The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. What a revelation! Kenneth Koch's sense of play, Frank O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems, the whole New York School in general -- the Beats -- it just blew my head off. I had no idea you could do this stuff.

Stop! Look! Listen! Derrick Austin's Music Recommendation

Posted on June 27, 2023

Though it was only released a month ago as I write this, Kelela’s album Raven has been on constant rotation: whether it’s the summery “On the Run,” the piercingly erotic “Sorbet,” or the emotionally expansive “Enough for Love.” Her fusion of R&B, house, and electronica is like no one else. Unlike a lot of contemporary albums, I tend to listen to Raven from start to finish. It asks you to immerse yourself.  

Stop! Look! Listen! John Wall Barger's Movie Recommendation

Posted on June 23, 2023

For my birthday a few years ago—August, 2020, just months into the pandemic—my partner Tiina bought me a projector, so we could watch films on our living room wall, and a subscription to the Criterion Channel. I’d always been a film lover, but this put me over the top. Since then I’ve been watching at least four or five old classic movies per week.

Stop! Look! Listen! Catherine Owen's Book Recommendation

Posted on June 13, 2023

The Resistance to Poetry by James Longenbach

As an admirer of rampant kinds of poetics, I first discovered this Longenbach volume shortly after its 2004 publication and was instantly struck by its refusal to make poetry accommodating, accessible, to evidence the strain so many other poetics texts possess in their aim to convince the reader of the genre’s palatability, transparency, likeability.  

Stop! Look! Listen! Alex Boyd's Book Recommendation

Posted on June 6, 2023

I’m a worrier. I worry when I see someone holding a smart-phone up to a baby rather than endure a little fussing, and I worry when another Dad says he puts his kids to bed telling them to amuse themselves with the iPad until they’re tired. Algorithms appear to be designed to give people more of the same, so that we become more entrenched, both in terms of the arts and our political views, even aside from the way scrolling wrecks our ability to concentrate and, you know, read a book.  

Stop! Look! Listen! Chelsea Peters' Music Recommendation

Posted on May 24, 2023

I often listen to the same album on repeat when I’m engaged in intense writing sessions – the rhythmic familiarity seems to provide the perfect level of inspiring-but-not-too-distracting background noise. The album I’ve listened to the most over the past couple of years, and that I always recommend to others, is my fellow Winnipegger, Begonia’s, Fear, which she released in 2019.

Stop! Look! Listen! Nicole Boyce's Music Recommendation

Posted on May 16, 2023

Every few years, I become fixated on an album and listen to it on repeat until my husband, children and cat are all desperate for reprieve. During the winter of 2021, Lotta Sea Lice was that album. A collaboration between speak-singing indie darlings Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett, it’s a subtle, well-crafted album that’s perfect to write to — it plods along pleasantly in the background until, one day, you realize that the songs are sneaky earworms and you never feel like listening to anything else.

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