https://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/feedPJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usWed, 11 Mar 2026 15:31:10 -0400<![CDATA[As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1979 book The Right Stuff, the American press up to the early 1960s had the tone of “The Victorian Gent,” telling Rolling Stone at the time, “I say Victorian gentleman, because it’s he who was the constant hypocrite, who insisted on public manifestations of morality that he would never insist upon privately in his own life. And I think that one tends to do that on a newspaper.”]]>Mon, 25 Sep 2023 19:00:27 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/09/25/radical-wolfe-tom-wolfe-documentary-n1729831<![CDATA[Staring at your local multiplex’s lengthy roster of superhero and science fiction movies, it’s easy to forget what an enormous sea change &#8220;Star Wars&#8221; created in Hollywood in 1977. The new breed of movies were built around family-friendly themes, happy endings, orchestral scores, and dazzling special effects. Out went a string of dark films with murky plots where the grizzled antihero inevitably died at the end. ‎]]>Tue, 19 Sep 2023 20:09:43 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/09/19/william-friedkins-sorcerer-n1728318<![CDATA[We’re all familiar with tribute bands; there are countless groups crisscrossing the world, dressing up as and playing the hits of the Beatles, the Stones, Pink Floyd, and loads of other superstar bands that have either broken up, stopped touring regularly, or if they’re still on the road, charge a fortune for tickets. Some tribute bands are more successful than others at playing the songs of the band they’re honoring note for note. But nobody has taken the goal of emulating a superstar artist to its absolute obsessive extreme as Japanese guitarist Akio Sakurai, aka “Mr. Jimmy,” the eponymous subject of a 2019 documentary now playing in theaters. (Two guesses as to the delay between its initial showcase at film festivals and its now wider distribution.)]]>Tue, 29 Aug 2023 23:24:18 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Culture]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/08/29/mr-jimmy-documentary-led-zeppelin-n1723111<![CDATA[&#8220;Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)&#8221; is a 2022 documentary that has recently been released on streaming platforms such as Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. It was directed by veteran Dutch rock photographer and video director Anton Corbijn, whose work was heavily influenced by Hipgnosis’ house style.]]>Mon, 28 Aug 2023 11:22:38 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/08/28/squaring-the-circle-hipgnosis-n1722573<![CDATA[]]>Fri, 11 Aug 2023 12:24:35 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Culture]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/08/11/under-the-volcano-n1718309<![CDATA[We naturally think of World War II as a series of set-piece battles: The Battle of Britain. Pearl Harbor. The Africa Campaign. Stalingrad. Pacific island hopping. And finally, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which prevented what would have been an absolute bloodbath of a battle. But WWII was won by the factories that could produce the most materiel. (Or in the case of Los Alamos, Christopher Nolan’s new &#8220;Oppenheimer&#8221; movie reminds us, the most revolutionary and lethal materiel.)]]>Tue, 25 Jul 2023 22:17:40 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/07/25/war-factories-n1713575<![CDATA[Last week, I watched one of the most inadvertently hilarious documentaries I have ever seen on YouTube. But before I get to it and expose you to the full horrors, some background on one of the trends in AI vocals — using artificial intelligence to replace the voiceovers in a foreign documentary with an English-speaking narrator using an American or British-sounding accent. It’s becoming cheaper to employ AI than a professional voiceover artist, as this 2021 Washington Post article titled, “Every movie and TV show could soon be dubbed into any language you want” hints:]]>Tue, 18 Jul 2023 15:14:50 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Conservatism]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/07/18/springtime-for-ai-n1711586<![CDATA[In the late 1990s, two trends began to radically change popular music. The first, and best known, was the rise of Napster, and Internet file trading of MP3s radically shrank the music industry’s revenue stream, which was largely funded by the very profitable royalties of compact discs. The second was the rapidly increasing ability to record music on a computer. Technology that the Beatles and George Martin would have killed for when they were recording Sgt. Pepper in 1966 and &#8217;67 was finally available in affordable, and in some cases, free software for the PC or Mac.]]>Thu, 06 Jul 2023 17:40:19 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Culture]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/07/06/home-studio-recording-the-complete-guide-n1708766<![CDATA[Apollo 11 was the epitome of a world-defining event. Everybody who was alive in 1969 remembers Neil Armstrong saying, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Similarly, the next year, the world focused on the crisis of Apollo 13 while it was ongoing, and that mission got a second shot at immortality thanks to the hugely popular 1995 Tom Hanks film directed by Ron Howard.]]>Sun, 26 Mar 2023 22:35:08 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Conservatism]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/03/26/apollo-8-first-to-the-moon-n1681754<![CDATA[In the years preceding 2018, to honor the centennial of the end of WWI, England’s Imperial War Museum allowed director Peter Jackson to rifle through their voluminous film archives. Using cutting-edge restoration technology, he produced They Shall Not Grow Old, a moving documentary of what it was like for the young British soldiers in the trenches of the Great War.]]>Mon, 09 Jan 2023 21:26:27 -0500<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Culture]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/01/09/auto-draft-36-n1660232<![CDATA[When most people think of “prog rock” British bands such as Yes, Genesis, and arguably, Pink Floyd all come to mind. These were ‘70s-and-‘80s-era warhorses who could fill hockey arenas and stadiums while performing songs in 7/8 time signatures with lyrics about supper being ready and lambs lying down on Broadway. But King Crimson, one of the first and most adventurous bands of this genre, while having a devoted following as a cult act, don’t fill up football stadiums, and with the exception of their first album in 1969, never graced the top ten of any album charts.]]>Wed, 04 Jan 2023 18:57:25 -0500<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Culture]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2023/01/04/king-crimson-n1658763<![CDATA[British poet Phillip Larkin famously wrote in 1967:]]>Sat, 17 Dec 2022 12:55:33 -0500<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2022/12/17/if-these-walls-could-sing-n1654420<![CDATA[On Jan. 11, 2016, very early in the morning, with the Christmas decorations still up, when I was still living in Milpitas, Calif., I was shocked to see multiple sources reporting the death of David Bowie at age 69 during a period marked by the deaths of several aging rock stars, including Lemmy, Glenn Frey, Paul Kantner, and Keith Emerson as well. I had lost track of Bowie’s career sometime in the early 2000s, so I simply assumed he and Iman were living in New York and London, being beautiful, wealthy superstars together. Needless to say, Bowie hid his cancer diagnosis remarkably well from the media until his demise.]]>Sat, 26 Nov 2022 13:45:37 -0500<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Culture]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2022/11/26/david-bowie-n1648768<![CDATA[]]>Wed, 23 Nov 2022 19:59:59 -0500<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2022/11/23/all-quiet-on-the-netflix-front-n1648364<![CDATA[One of the legends of how Quentin Tarantino learned to direct was watching movies while working in a Southern California video rental store. However, the store contained not just fuzzy VHS cassettes of the usual Hollywood popcorn fare, but videos of obscure European art house films and other exotica the owner taped off the broadcasts of a Los Angeles cable channel whose fans simply called “The Z.”]]>Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:33:56 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Culture]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2022/10/28/z-channel-n1640766<![CDATA[Back in June of 2018, I published what was quite possibly the first review of the then-brand-new Eventide H9000 Harmonizer. At least, to my astonishment, it was the first review linked to Eventide’s Website. To this day, I’ve found that there’s a dearth of information and audio clips of the H9000 in action, so I’m writing this article for the person who is Googling around, thinking of acquiring an H9000, wanting to hear some audio clips, and looking to read about the unit in action. (Conversely, to paraphrase Austin Powers, if recording music isn’t your bag, baby, this article is likely to read as absolute gibberish.)]]>Sat, 01 Oct 2022 15:48:42 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Culture]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2022/10/01/eventide-h9000-four-years-on-n1633847<![CDATA[As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Tom Cruise was wise to demand that Top Gun: Maverick appear on the big screen and not get lost as yet another nostalgic product on the Paramount+ streaming platform, where it would be just another sentimental memberberry:]]>Wed, 22 Jun 2022 11:28:09 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Conservatism]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2022/06/22/the_godfather_at_50-n1607139<![CDATA[As arguably America’s last remaining movie superstar, it’s hard to call any Tom Cruise movie a “surprise” hit, but Top Gun: Maverick has had surprisingly powerful legs in its second week at the box office. But much like the way they turned out en masse for Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, American audiences are thrilled to finally see a military-themed movie that’s pro-America.]]>Sat, 11 Jun 2022 11:51:09 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[USA]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2022/06/11/top-gun-maverick-n1604790<![CDATA[In 2019, Pete Townshend, the guitarist and chief songwriter of The Who, released one of his periodic works of fiction, The Age of Anxiety. That title would have worked equally well for his new Audible audiobook, Somebody Saved Me. With a running time of two hours and one minute, the book covers the era of Townshend’s life from 1977 to 2002. Those years are bracketed by the death, in 1978, of the band’s legendary hellraising drummer Keith Moon, and 2002, when their bassist, John Entwistle died. (Cutting his audio book off in 2002 also avoids having to rehash the unpleasantness that would follow Townshend for years soon after.) This was a key period in The Who’s history, with Moon being replaced by Kenney Jones from The Faces, the band signing a big-money contract with Warner Brothers, and Townshend going with Atlantic Records’ subsidiary label Atco for his solo albums. These two deals meant that Townshend was on the hook for seven albums over seven years, which meant he needed to do a frantic amount of songwriting. And on top of that, there were the horrors of his band’s concert in Cincinnati in 1979, at which 11 people died.]]>Sun, 22 May 2022 12:33:40 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Conservatism]]><![CDATA[Entertainment]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2022/05/22/pete-townshend-somebody-saved-me-n1599871<![CDATA[On Saturday, I attended the 2022 Dallas International Guitar Festival at the Dallas Market Hall, the second festival after a timeout in 2020 due to the pandemic lockdown. As I wrote last year at Instapundit, unlike the previous guitar shows in the DFW Metroplex, 2021’s show had a somewhat more low-key feel, lacking the large exhibits by the music industry heavy hitters such as Gibson and Fender. (In pre-pandemic times, a large trailer owned by Gibson would be displaying their newest and most impressive guitars, Fender usually had a large display, and Roland was showing off the latest effects in their Boss line as well.)]]>Tue, 03 May 2022 23:20:35 -0400<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]><![CDATA[Conservatism]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2022/05/03/the-2022-dallas-guitar-show-n1594951