I don’t know how I missed this the other day, but it may be the definitive painfully postmodern New York Times story: Fox News makes Sarah Palin looks like an idiot; the New York Times makes the Fox News team look like a bunch of idiots; and The New Republic and Los Angeles Times look [...]

I saw a flier for that ubiquitous show this week. I keep hoping some bored post-modernist will write a play entitled “How I Was Molested By My Uncle.” And then it will be about a girl who gets her learner’s permit.

Dunno how I missed them before, but these self-deprecating parody Chicago Tribune fronts are a good laugh.

There’s much to be said about Ron Rosenbaum’s latest, on Jeff Jarvis’ new media consultancy, but that’s all I’m gonna say at the moment.

Well, I suppose this was bound to happen at some point:
[O]n November 11, Simon & Schuster imprint Fireside Books will publish The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present. This handy paperback chronologically explores Pitchfork’s 500 favorite songs from 1977-2006, constructing an alternate history of the past three decades [...]

Lately, I keep seeing ads for this all over town, premiering this weekend. It was nagging my brain for a week before I realized it must be an adaptation of a series I half read over a decade ago. No doubt the show will be wretched, but the thing is there’s almost no way it [...]

Donadio’s fine post on the madness of Mr. Krauthammer put me in mind of the wonderful poem by Constantine Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians”:
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What [...]

This is one beautiful site.

My old pal Brady Miller’s new band is tearing it up in the New York club scene.  Check out the instrumentation on the lead track on the page, “Starling.”  Great stuff.

Nat Hentoff has a solid piece here on the Afro-Semitic Experience, a group that draws on black and Jewish musical traditions, playing jazz, klezmer, gospel and Afro-Cuban music. Hentoff recounts a wonderful conversation he had with Charles Mingus about the moment they first knew they could never be without music.

I would like to second Dan’s distaste for the blatherings of Horace Engdahl, a name straight out of a Kingsley Amis novel. I would also like to second his appreciation for the writings of Neal Stephenson. It’s true, he can be a bit pretentious. But I’ll stack the first chapter of Snow Crash — an [...]

I share Adam Kirsch’s frustration and pique regarding the statements by the Nobel academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, that Americans haven’t gotten the Nobel recently because “[t]he U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.” It was of course [...]

Perhaps, if you’re like me, you’ve enjoyed films like the Rocky series, all the while thinking to yourself, “I could’ve used more training scenes.”
Well, then, I have just the film for you. Provided that you’re not overly bothered by things like radical breaks in continuity, arbitrary use of slow-motion effects, fluorescent-colored blood, or subliterate subtitles, [...]

I finally got around to seeing the lovely Persepolis last night. For those who don’t know, it’s an animated — in luminous black and white — adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical comic. It begins with her early childhood in Tehran, on the eve of the Islamic revolution, following her through her student years in Vienna [...]

Over at Slate, David Haglund attempts to make the case that the Big Lebowski works as an anticipation of the perfidy of the neocons:
Watching The Big Lebowski in 2008, it becomes clear that appreciating Walter is essential to understanding what the Coen brothers are up to in this movie, which is slyer, more political, and [...]

Eminent metaphor-monger Thomas L. Friedman has just dropped a new book on us, awesomely entitled Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — And How it Can Renew America.
It takes a special degree of chutzpah to actually reference your previous book in the title of your new one. I look forward to [...]

Acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa died 10 years ago today. IMDB tips the hat to him in its daily poll, whose results are kind of embarrassing, but a nice gesture, nonetheless.
I wonder how American parents would go about explaining Kurosawa’s work to kids who’ve never seen anything from the last century. “See, he [...]

So I saw the French thriller Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne if, like my girlfriend, you’re into lording your fluency over others) the other night.
Without giving too much away, the basic plot is as follows: Alex Beck, a young doctor, is vacationing with his (really) lovely wife at the same lake they’ve [...]

Stanley Fish takes on the cant of “academic freedom” in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Is academic freedom a philosophical concept tied to larger concepts of individual dignity and autonomy, or is it a guild concept developed in an effort to insulate the enterprise from the threat of a hostile takeover? I [...]

Sonny vs. the National Post:
What the article fails to acknowledge is Smith’s talent as an actor; how is his persona any less acceptable than that of Bogart or Grant–similarly rote character actors who found super stardom while pulling the same act over and over again. Smith is a regular, pleasant guy who can pull off [...]