I just got done watching The Ox-Bow Incident (yes, more dissertation viewing). Did the film really chalk lynch mentality down to repressed/latent homosexuality?
Filmically, it was mix of half 30s classicism and half falt, floodlit B&W expressionism. I’m willing to entertain counterexamples, but I felt as if I were watching the first (unbeknownst) film noir.
Via Chuck Tryon, I see that the Telegraph has a list of the 50 Best cover songs. Not a bad list, with some of the obvious choices - Devo’s “Satisfaction” and the Clash’s “I Fought the Law” - as well as some less obvious but still worthy inclusions, like the Flying Lizards’ “Money”.
So, what might […]
Part occasioned by a conference on the topic and part inspired by a tremendous personal photograph collection in its possesion, Boston University has started running an exhibit of vernacular photography. Essentially, the concept is similar to that of found photography, without the connotation of the Artist discovering the objects and transforming them, a la ready-made, […]
Jon Chait’s op-ed on the National Endowment for the Arts has been talk of the day. Arguing that the Democrats should find a compromise issue in abolishing arts funding, he writes,
[L]et’s face it, the NEA is in large part a way of forcing the NASCAR set to subsidize the art house set.
None of that would […]
While the upstart Herald trying to gain a steady market share from the hegemonic Globe has garnered a bit of attention, Steve Bailey discusses the other newspaper war in town: the challenge the Weekly Dig is mounting against the Phoenix.
Can a soon-to-be-40 alternative paper continue to connect with its twentysomething audience?
Others have tried to […]
Throughout the 1930s. Warner Brothers specialized in low-budget “headliner” films, action-based narratives taking topical material as their basis. Some of these would go on to become foundational texts of the social problem genre (I Am a Fugitive from the Chain Gang, Heroes for Sale, Wild Boys of the Road), but in fact the “headliner” genre […]
Matt Yglesias warns that we shouldn’t throw out tax progressivity under the guise of tax reform.
Tax code simplification is in the air. And it’s a good idea. Also in the air is the flat tax. This is a bad idea. Importantly, these two ideas have no relationship to one another, mythologizing on the part of […]
It’s a thoroughly entertaining film, and at times smart. Alexander Payne knows how to ratchet up pathos unlike any other contemporary writer-director. And unlike About Schmidt, in which the condescension to its characters curdled, here Payne finds the inner humanism of his pathetic protagonists. I rather liked the loving satire of wine culture and of […]
Great review today in the New York Times on the Beatles’ Capitol reissues. The issue at hand: all of the Beatles albums have based their CD release on the British Parlophone version. While more definitive, they’re quite different, with different songs and track orders. As the All Music Guide explains,
The Beatles were hardly the […]
If you need a little break of humor, take a second to look at the post-election update from Article 8 Alliance, a group organized against gay marriage in Massachusetts. Under the headline “Homosexual Movement Shows its True Colors,” it gripes,
Outside of each polling place, [pro-gay-marriage Somerville candidate Carl] Sciortino’s campaign had groups of angry, enraged […]
Speaking to the coordination problem I referred to yesterday, let me point out as evidence the Internet rumors of voting improprieties robbing Kerry of the election. Nothing is so transparently self-delusional as inventing post-facto conspiracies in face of a four point loss. If we can’t get “our” act together to stop thinking/speaking small-scale ridiculousness as […]
Now the other Red vs. Blue story… currently watching The Biggest Loser on NBC, where the Red team and Blue team of overweight contestants compete to lose more weight. Is this is a genre parody?
I haven’t had the focus for a proper, well-composed treatise on the subject and, besides, there’s just too much soul-searching post-election analysis to digest. So here, in no particular order, are my thought on the culture gap, value gap, electoral gap, whatever you want to diagnose as the issue.
1. Turns out gay marriage may not […]
Kenneth Easwaran at Cardinal Collective has compiled the above map showing the current status of laws regarding same-sex marriage in the US and Canada. Light blue states/provinces allow gay marriage, whereas dark blue recognize marriages from other states. Light red have constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage, where dark red ones have laws forbidding it. Purple […]
Forget parsing and second-guessing the President’s words and intentions over reaching across the partisan aisle. If you want to know what the next two years are going to look like, read/watch the NewsHour’s rountable discussion on the chances of bipartisanship. The panelists were unable to assess the likelihood or virtues of bipartisan cooperation without quickly […]