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Acknowledgments W hen Keith Richards was once asked how he came up with the worldhistorical chords for “Satisfaction,” he responded by saying that he had dreamed them: he got up one morning and, bam!, there they were on the tape recorder. “In dreams begin responsibilities . . .” I invoke Delmore Schwarz because, to accentuate the obvious, books incur responsibilities, not least to one’s dreamwork. Although the following debts are rather more familiar and less strange, none of the people acknowledged is in any way responsible for whatever errors of fact or fantasy remain uncorrected in this book. First off, I’m enormously grateful to James Peltz, Interim Director at State University of New York Press, as well as to the editor of the Postmodern Series at SUNY Press, Joe Natoli, for their steadfast encouragement and unstinting support. I’m also grateful to Margaret Copeley for her painstaking copyediting of the manuscript, and to Marilyn Semerad, for scrupulously overseeing its production. I owe debts, both large and small, to numerous people at Ohio University: Leslie Flemming, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, for time off to work on this book; Ken “The Kinks” Daley, for being an unusually solicitous and good-natured chair while I was going down the long and winding road of actually completing the manuscript; Joe McLaughlin, our new chair, for cheerfully working to remunerate me for the illustrations and, together with Howard Dewald, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, for the cover image of Chuck Berry; my colleagues in the English Department for their day-to-day, week-to-week, quarterto -quarter collegiality (no mean thing these days); Gerri Lux, for graciously greenlighting miniprojects and generally being a super-fun person; Barb Grueser, for being unfailingly helpful and cheerful about assisting me in all manner of tasks; Todd Gardner, for regularly coming to my aid, with alacrity and nary a complaint, in the electronic preparation of the manuscript; Richard Comfort, for assiduously assembling the xiii index; Cara DiBlasi, for diligently compiling the bibliography; and last but by no means least, the graduate and undergraduate students in my Literary Theory and Popular Culture classes—especially the “Buffy” gang (Grant Allen, Katherine Furler, Christina Pedersen)—who, like good Socratic fellows, sparked me while I endeavored to think and feel my way, sometimes blindly, through various texts and ideas. As a number of these chapters have appeared, albeit in slightly different form, in journals, I’m much obliged to the following editors: for chapter 1, “Rock ’n’ Theory,” Lisa Brawley and Stuart Moulthrop at Postmodern Culture; for chapter 4, “Audiophilia,” John Caughie and Simon Frith at Screen; for chapter 5, “Gen-X TV,” Stephen Tropiano at the Journal of Film and Video; and for chapter 6, “Shot/Countershot,” Warren Buckland at New Studies in Film and Television. A tip of the hat goes, in addition, to Matthew Byrnie, for offering some early, prescient suggestions about the final shape of the book; and to Michael Bérubé, fellow drummer and rock music fan, who provided the perfect response to the call of the book’s title (and the conclusion to the introduction ): “Roll over Adorno and tell Horkheimer the news.” Other debts closer to home include my erstwhile compatriots in Athens (and, now, Columbus): Kasia Marciniak, who over the years has proved to be an especially probing interlocutor; Elizabeth Renker, with whom I shared, over red wine and dinner, mutually sympathetic conversations about the labors of book-making; Whitney Huber, who despite my occasionally indiscriminate fondness for the ephemera of pop culture, has impressed upon me the importance of feminism and the very real pleasures of counter-cinema (not to mention the enduring musical virtues of PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth); and David Lazar, with whom over music and the more than occasional martini (not shaken or stirred, but poured straight from the freezer), I’ve discussed virtually everything under the sun—from Art Deco to Hitchcock, Houdini’s Box to The Really Big Questions (Kelly vs. Astaire). Merci to Jayne “Jessica” Burchard, who not only put up with me in the most pleasant manner imaginable during the time in which I composed the very last parts of this book but has continually reminded me that Prada and progressive politics, NOW and Cat Power, though by no means identical, are not mutually exclusive either. Since intellectual work can seem pretty hollow without the support of family, however one chooses to define it, a special shout-out to my nephew...

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