Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Live Is Better

Is time speeding up? Can tomorrow already be Thursday again? That means those creepy, I mean Mad, morons--oh, no,I mean Men--will be our portal to bizarro land, I mean Matt Weiner's brilliant idea of the early 1960s. Tom Watson will be leading our Greek chorus this week over at newcritics, 10:00p.m....
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Monday, August 27, 2007

Creative Differences of Note

There are people who contribute tangible beauty to the day, and others who drain it away. Since art is subjective, what actually gets produced onscreen, on tv, on the stage or in choir loft of a church is the result of power, plain and simple.I’ve been a serious amateur singer since I met a choir director 20 years ago who taught me to read Renaissance polyphony. My ability to sight read the inner...
              

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Live Blogging Mad Men: By the Waters of Babylon

I like television with episode titles. Titles give support to the themes of specific shows within larger story arcs. They can be very straightforward, like “Evan” of Miami Vice, or more editorial, like “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run” from its season 2. They can be playful, like the Remington Steele titles that all used his name, e.g., “In the Steele of the Night,” and the all-time classics— “The City...
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Remodeling

I am doing a little home improvement, in the kitchen. Not as involved as many do, hoping to keep the cost and confusion to a minimum. It is a privilege of the middle clases to be able to refresh one's living space. I need to pick up the prolific Witold Rybczynski's Home: A Short History of an Idea,...
         

Friday, August 10, 2007

QQF: The New Yorker Cartoon Contest

Update 8/12: Here's what I submitted: "One small breakthrough in the lab, and he insisted he gets to go to Disneyland."I have been repeatedly unloved by the New Yorker cartoon judges, but I will not give up.Join in yourself. You can enter your caption here. I'm still thinking about mine. We have until...
              

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Live Blogging Mad Men

Tom Watson, editor in chief extraordinaire of newcritics.com, has asked me to sit in for him to drive tomorrow's live blogging of AMC's hot new series, Mad Men, at 10:00 p.m., ET. It's true, men in exquisitly tailored suits is something I know and care about . . . But these men certainly make it hard....
              

Monday, August 6, 2007

Shirts and Skins; Jets and Sharks; Horcruxes and Hallows

What the hell is a Hallow?Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Didn’t that title bother anyone? It’s one of the most widely known books on the planet now, and the title has a word that I doubt many people can define. And shouldn’t it be “deadly” hallows? “Deathly” sounds wrong there.I wanted to see if I was the only one baffled by the opening salvo of the final Harry Potter book, and so I checked...
              

Friday, August 3, 2007

QQF: Create a Simpson Avatar

This seems to be the week for confessions: I don't know Bergman's films, and I don't follow The Simpsons. Something about the animation just keeps me out. Lance started quite an anti-Simpsons zone at his place when he confessed that he HATES the Springfield family. It seems a lot of people have been...
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Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Ingmar & Michelangelo: Into the West

A quirk of fate: Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day. These deaths of old men—-89 and 94—-bring their work to everyone’s attention for a few blinks of the eye. I have not seen the classic Bergmans. I’ve never felt drawn to his particular, highly intellectualized world, which Michiko Kakutani summed up as “a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge,...
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