Asceticism, angst, and ennui – with Alain Delon!

I’m gone four days and hell breaks loose… As Stephen Holden wrote today, Ingmar Bergman, and now Michaelangelo Antonioni, belong to cinema’s past, of a time when going to the(ir) movies was a ritual akin to attending high Mass: attending was soul-cleansing. Their asceticism, while often overwrought (and cramped compared to their contemporary Luis Bunuel’s

Of cigar stands and incandescent guillotines

I envy anyone who gets to hear Pavement for the first time. This reminds me, despite Mallory’s claims, that they were a lot like their detractors said they were, and a great deal more besides. Warming to them around the time of Brighten The Corners — whose title remains the straightest joke Stephen Malkmus has

The Evolution of Ciara

The chart success of blank R&B songstresses like Rihanna and the newly Timbalanded Nelly Furtado makes me appreciate Ciara’s achievements all the more. If their producers hired them as one more sound in a package that’s increasingly rococo, then at worst they can just stand there and wail. Ciara has the rare talent, last seen

The screwball of our discontent, Pt. II

James Wolcott’s noticed the sheer looniness of that David Denby jeremiad published in last week’s New Yorker on the condition of modern romantic comedy. Denby writes: Romantic comedy is entertainment in the service of the biological imperative. The world must be peopled. Even if the lovers are past child-rearing age or, as in recent years,

Ah, history

I can’t seem to upload the picture, but click here to see evidence of how long (and how closely) Neil Tennant’s been watching New Order.

Act Your Age

Trashing a former wise ass is no fun, especially when the rock and roll plains are strewn with the corpses of ironists who renounced their winning ways for a notion of sincerity that doesn’t reckon with the rhythms of biology: a calcifying body needs constant amusement. Senescence without wit is suicide. Nick Lowe won a

Temptation in Technicolor

Having survived second-album-syndrome, Dizzee Rascal delivers his most confident release to date. It’s almost silly to write excitedly about Maths + English now that whatever NPR-created aura of exoticism has dissipated, but the indifference with which this has been greeted offends me a bit. We do things a bit differently in America, unlike the British