Longtime readers will know that I love Kanye West. He’s a great producer and an okay rapper that still manages to be interesting at almost all times. I’m sure Timbaland, much as I admire him, was thinking he deserved to have some of Kanye’s success as both producer and performer, but Timba’s recent [...]
Is hip-hop a destructive force?
This past weekend, Thomas Chatterton Williams, a graduate student at NYU, had an op-ed in the WaPo called Black Culture Beyond Hip-Hop which argues that for most Americans “hip-hop culture is black culture” and that the culture’s “misogynistic, violent and nihilistic” nature poses “the most formidable obstacle to success and equality in the black middle [...]
“I find your lack of faith disturbing. “
My new Spot-on column is up and it’s driven by the fact that today is the 30th anniversary of Star Wars.
The Force Is Always With You
When I started working on the piece earlier this week, I was prepared be quite cynical about the whole thing. I had quotes from a co-worker of mine about [...]
High School High
¡Ay, caramba! Esto es fantástico.
Via Jessica Hopper’s blog, the trailer for I Remember Andrea.
Andrea Wachner hated her high school (really hated), so she sent a stripper to impersonate her at her 10-year reunion and then filmed the whole thing.
Genius.
The film’s MySpace page.
Tags: Andrea Wachner, I Remember Andrea
The jolt of Björk
Björk’s sixth full-length studio album Volta has just been released and it’s more of the usual greatness. I don’t always love everything she does, but she never fails to be interesting and unique.
For a while there, she was firmly in the worlds of alternative and dance music, but at this stage, she does whatever [...]
Whose standards?
A recent article in WaPo made me think of two of my Spot-on columns: my article on Shilpa Shetty’s appearance on Celebrity Big Brother came to mind, because of the later controversy when Richard Gere kissed her, and my piece on Dinesh D’Souza, because he claims that his home country of India is having [...]
Good night, Mars.
Last night, Veronica Mars came to an apparent end, not with a bang, but a whimper. The CW has not elected to renew the show and it appears to be gone Daddy gone.
I only wrote about the series once, but I was a great admirer of it. It had old school rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, [...]
Everyone’s a critic
Via Political Animal, I found Richard Schickel’s diatribe against blogger critics. You can read the piece or just Kevin Drum’s summary and then come on back. Yeah, okay. This kind of stuff is stupid. With wearying regularity these days, some member of the mainstream press registers complaints about the blogosphere and [...]
Diamonds and guns
My new Spot-on column is up, called “The MPAA Blows Smoke,” and it’s all about the move by the Motion Picture Association of America to take smoking into account when rating films. While I have some sympathy for the intention, this is not an organization I trust particularly.
In my piece, I make reference to [...]
Another Higgins Tribute
You may recall the flood of material back in November and December of last year related to the death of John M. Higgins. Now, Aaron Barnhart, TV critic at the K.C. Star and curator of TV Barn, offered his tribute to Higgins this week, in the course of reporting on the CBS upfront presentation.
It [...]