Summer Reruns: Chris Isaak and the Silvertones (and more):

Saw Chris Isaak and the Silvertones tonight in Boston at the Fleet Pavilion. It was a great concert, though the sound system for the vocals was pretty harsh. Anyhow, here is what I wrote about last summer’s concert at Foxwoods:



When is Real Faux?



Which was actually a follow up to this previous post that you might want to read first:



When is Faux Real?



While I am rerunning old posts, searching for these two I ran across this reaction to seeing The Producers for the first time:



Springtime for Hitler:

Update: WE’RE NOT NAFF!: Normally I do not respond to ad hominem blog posts, but I found this one particularly amusing:

The Naffness of Randy Barnett and the Volokh Conspiracy



I have long been a reader of the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog writen [sic] by lawyers and political theorists. I have always found it a bit off-putting, although I could never exactly think why. Now I now [sic]. It is written by people–some of whom are friends of mine–who are incurably and unutterably “naff”–to use one of my favorite new British terms. Just consider the following entry:

Chris Isaak and the Silvertones (and more):



Saw Chris Isaak and the Silvertones tonight in Boston at the Fleet Pavilion…

Who could take seriously a person or indeed a blog with a comment like that. It calls to mind a guy sitting in his Honda Accord listening to the local AM station, whistling along to America’s “Been to the desert with a horse with no name.

We here at the Volokh Conspiracy wear our naffness as a badge of honor (though I have not polled my fellow Conspirators on this), as I imagine do many of our readers. And we can guess that the politics of those who find the naffness of others “a bit off-putting” involves their superior concern for “the people.”

Update: REVENGE OF THE NAFFS! I neglected yesterday to put a link to Dave Gwydion’s A Man Abroad, the blog that posted the previous comment on “naffness.” When I went to do so today, I discovered that The Naffness of Randy Barnett and the Volokh Conspiracy had been taken down. What do you suppose this means? Perhaps Gwydion–a self-described “American Academic on Sabbatical in London”–was embarrassed by his own display of anti-naff naffness. This naff business is very tricky, as it has always been uncool to proclaim how cool one is, including by deriding the uncoolness–I mean naffness–of others.