Well, yes

David Thomson, reviewing Tom Kalin’s tentative film career and his pretty good (and, until Savage Grace, only) film Swoon: It was hard to see Swoon without detecting a gay film, but that mood was no more pressing or less complicated than the fact that Goodfellas was a claim made for heterosexuality in an essentially gay

Hardly fashionable, but my Oldie of the Week is OMD’s “So In Love,” their first of four American Top 40 hits. Everyone knows “If You Leave,” which then and now I’ve always found one of the worst beloved hits of all time — garish and obvious, from the synthesized percussion to the breathy way in

I haven’t written about movies in a while. Let me catch up. Enchanted (2007): One of the movie’s least remarked on jokes is that no one in Manhattan blinks an eyelash when Amy Adams’ cartoon princess steps out of a manhole cover in Guinevere drag; it says little when prince James Marsden jumps atop a

Circle in the Sand

A couple of weeks ago, former Stylus colleague Jonathan Bradley thought it would be a nice idea if the rest of our former colleagues assembled summer mix tapes. I collaborated with Dan Weiss on mine. Download the mix here; the tracklist is below. Here are the prefaces we wrote: Mixing this was a necessary challenge.

Doin’ The Things That They Want To

What I admire most in a beloved musician is what I call colloquial mastery, and Matos‘ post on Prince’s “Blue Light” is exactly what I had in mind. I only warmed to”Blue Light” after absorbing Prince’s other work, and for other reasons: it’s a song recorded after the artist, having nothing further to prove, refines

Bravo, Senator Obama…

…for reminding us that you can pander as abjectly as your colleague, Senator John McCain. As I’ve written elsewhere, this was an especially sordid move when every poll shows that the Democrats will not just keep but expand their Congressional majorities. So why are they afraid of being called Soft on Terror by chicken hawk

To be responsible, I listened to Girl Talk’s new one twice, but I knew I hated it upon hearing the third track. As I wrote somewhere else, this is the album-length equivalent of participating in a music trivia night at your local bar, with the dork at the table (okay, me) identifying Survivor tunelets. I

To be responsible, I listened to Girl Talk’s new one twice, but I knew I hated it upon hearing the third track. As I wrote somewhere else, this is the album-length equivalent of participating in a music trivia night at your local bar, with the dork at the table (okay, me) identifying Survivor tunelets. I

Tim Russert’s dead. It’s awful, world-historic, so much so that yesterday NBC Nightly News actually showed a clip of Brian Williams mourning the death of his colleague while footage of the Iowa floods played in the background. If you need further examples of the depravity of our punditocracy, watch this video of Wesley Clark being

Driving home on Father’s Day, I had the pleasure of catching on the adult contemporary station one of the very best ballads of the nineties. Although it led to the inevitable saccharine Disney ballad, and remains the peak of Vanessa L. Willams‘ career in the era before Mary J. Blige, Aaliyah, and Brandy effected a

Deborah Solomon a cranky and rather useless interview with Gore Vidal, who can’t be bothered anything but growl stale bon mots. But his paranoia is so succinct it’s funny: And what about Mr. McCain? Disaster. Who started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his

So-called “social conservatives” take heart: gay marriage in Massachusetes is as banal as marriage for everybody else: Some same-sex couples say being married has made a big difference, and some say it has made no difference at all. There are devoted couples who have decided marriage is not for them, couples whose lawyers or accountants