So my predictions didn’t pan out so badly, though it failed to win me my Oscar pool, as I ended up in a three-way tie at 18 out of 24 correct. Which just goes to show that this endless speculation and handicapping in the media has made everyone (even me) an expert in Academythink. As […]
In a new experiment in public self-humiliation, I decided to post my Oscar predictions this year, see below the fold. Actually a lot of it came from what I’ve read (thanks Entertainment Weekly!), with just a few contrarian picks thrown in to make it interesting. But since this year I thought I’d track how well […]
With all due respect to my diligent fellow liberals at Blue Mass Group, but why the hell are they still jonesing for a Deval Patrick run for governor? Why does .08 Acres think Patrick and Reilly equally uninspiring? Just take a look at yesterday’s Herald (nothing in the Globe yersterday… some days it could care […]
Josh Chafetz at OxBlog is raising a fuss over recent German polls showing preference to Putin over Bush:
no matter what your values (within the range of the reasonable), Bush is preferable to Putin. Put differently, if the poll-takers suddenly found themselves in the Bundestag, where their preferences had consequences, I think they would come out […]
I’ve been crossing off entries on my film scholar list of shame as I discover that Netlix has on them on DVD. Fortunately, it’s been a fun task. Tout Va Bien (dir. Godard and Gorin) was far more fun than I’d anticipated, given the number of things I’d read touting its Brechtian, anti-narrative techniques. Or […]
I’m all for the kind of deeper ideological reading of the Clash that Stephen Metcalf does in Slate. I’m even receptive to an argument that the band performed its authenticity. But I’m wondering where the author comes up with this:
With London Calling, the Clash merged the arty daring and political sincerity of the ’60s with […]
No time for a substantive post this morning, so I just thought I’d round up some MP3 links I’ve seen lately:
The Charlatans have a new album out, though without a US distributor I doubt many here are aware. It’s been billed as a return to form, and listening to it streamed I can say it’s […]
Thanks to Adam at Universal Hub for the mention of me/this blog in the Globe yesterday. If you otherwise happened to be flipping though the Sunday paper, perhaps you came across this letter to the editor, in response to an article on Ayn Rand:
America in the 21st century desperately needs more people like Howard Roark: […]
Finally watched Dog Star Man the other night. (Thanks again to Criterion Collection). The DVD comes loaded with interviews with Stan Brakhage, to which I can only the offer the advice not to listen to it and just watch the films. Either he reduces complex films to simplistic, even cheesy, meanings, or else he spouts […]
For those who haven’t seen, the Bostonist, spinoff of Gothamist is up and running. There are still a few kinks to iron out (trackback URLs that read chicagoist.com) and sometimes I feel that the writers don’t know Boston all that well. But misgivings I might have succumb to the success of the site itself. This […]
Since traditional print news media are superior to bloggers in the nuts-and-bolts reporting where phones have to be picked up and leads followed, and since I don’t have much shoeleather or rollover minutes to spare, I thought I’d propose a great story idea to some enterprising investigative reporter: track what actually happens to the materials […]
Majikthise has a good post riffing off another blogger David Velleman’s suggestion that rather than focus on protecting the legal protection of gay rights against discrimination, harassment, etc., we can simply make all sexuality private.
[I]it’s almost impossible to live a normal life without disclosing a lot of information about one’s sexual orientation.
Heterosexuals simply […]
Criterion does a wonderful job in their DVD transfers, and I don’t need to talk up all the fine films they rerelease (even if their tastes tend more toward the cultish than mine). But they’ve just put out Bertolucci’s first feature, La Commare Secca/The Grim Reaper, which is just fantastic. Based on a Pasolini story, […]
Last night Greater Boston had a segment on the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling that the Commonwealth’s funding scheme for school districts is meeting its constitutional duty to lower-income school districts. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I think the SJC got it right; it reserved the provision of adequate […]
My friend Derek has before asked me if, given my non-Hegelian bent, whether I subscribed to some End of History thesis, the notion that political and economic liberalism has once and for all triumphed over alternatives. I wasn’t very good at answering the question: I felt that a) yes in the medium term liberalism and […]