Thanks to the giallo horror film obsession of my friend Bruce, I was able to watch a particularly good example of the genre last night, The House with Laughing Windows (1976, dir. Pupi Avati). You can read fuller summaries of Italian horror and the giallo films elsewhere, but in short they were a pulp/exploitation genre […]
It’s Media Bias day among my favorite liberal pundits. Here’s Paul Krugman:
…front-page coverage of the 2000 debates emphasized not what the candidates said but their “body language.” After the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Mr. Gore’s sighs, but nothing about Mr. Bush’s lies. And even the fact-checking pieces “buried inside the newspaper” […]
Slate’s Seth Stevenson files a travel dispatch from India that reads uncannily like a scene from an Eric Ambler novel, and Brad DeLong takes him to task:
Seth Stevenson thinks that those who do not buy the [Kerala-made] coir mats are morally superior to Debbie and the rest of us: they are not complicit in the […]
I wish I Heart Huckabee’s would dispense with the shameless “get them talking” marketing plan - can’t they just tell us what the damned film’s about? I’ll go see it, I swear. But I did love this pastiche of nonprofit logo design on the film website:
The ‘child script’ one is my favorite.
You’re not going to have old Tommy Finneran to kick around anymore. Today, his resignation from the House of Reps and from his role as Speaker is official and the North End’s Sal diMasi is poised to take over.
First, I should say that the move bodes well for the continued legality of gay marriage in […]
I’ve been trying to discover a bit of the world of music- and MP3 blogs, and in the process came across Lost Bands of the New Wave Era. The idea is a great one:
The purpose of this site is to give exposure to great music that never had a chance to be heard but should […]
Sexual McCarthyism strikes Brockton:
Jay Dembling is embarassed, but unapologetic.
By all accounts, he was doing nothing illegal by throwing men-only sex parties once or twice a month in his Brockton home. But when the Boston Herald got wind that Brockton police officers had shown up at Dembling’s residence during a party on the afternoon of Aug. […]
In an otherwise on-the-mark obituary for Johnny Ramone, the Economist gives us this odd observation.
His political views were wildly out of step. Almost uniquely in the rock-music industry, he was a staunch conservative.
The rock music industry? We’re not talking about David Geffen or Britney Spears or some Warner Music A&R guy here. Wouldn’t “rock music […]
The Emile de Antonio film series continues at the Harvard Film Archive. I missed Underground, which I desperately wanted to see after seeing it excerpted in the recent Weather Underground. But I did make it In the Year of the Pig and am quite glad I did. Simply put, it’s an incredible documentary, and […]
Blame India Watch points out a study at Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy titled Executive Excess’ Report: CEO Pay Soars at Companies That Send Jobs Overseas. It’s a polemic arguing that CEOs get “perverse incentives to destroy communities” by shipping jobs abroad and as such offers the usual lefty case […]
Now that I’ve more or less finished the site redesign, I thought I’d revisit the blogroll that has been lying dormant. It’s now back up. I’m not the most liberal in my blogrolling, just because I don’t see the use in a list 70 blogs long that no one will visit. For that reason, I’ve […]
Just returned from the Stop and Shop, where a perennial gripe came into consciousness as an outright question. Why do large supermarkets organize their aisles according to the type of person who buys a certain kind of food? It used to be they divided their merchandise according to type of food, and to the casual […]
I thought I’d inaugurate a new feature here, regular reviews of films of interest that I’ve seen. They may range from captions to essays, trivial to technical-jargony. I’ll be sure to flag any obvious spoilers, of course.
Saturday night I went to see Kontroll (Hungary, Nimrod Antal), which is showing as part of the Boston […]
It’s not too much of a surprise, I suppose, that Andrea Cabral has won the Suffolk County Sheriff race. But given the 60-40 lead, it seems that this race is the Steve Murphy challenge is the best thing that could have happened to her career, as it’s given the politically untested appointee the mantle of […]
Kevin Drum has an excellent, pithy post up on Social Security and conservative’s attempt to explain away the costs (approx. $2 trillion) that it would take to shift from our current system to privatized accounts.
Despite the best efforts of conservatives to scare everyone under 30 into thinking that Social Security is doomed, it’s actually […]