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Continue reading →: Singles 9/2
Lots of interesting comments about Hurts’ first and still best synth-pop single, one so indebted to eighties signifiers that I think critics forgot the degree to which video and marketing shaped reception then. Actually, the lead singer’s earnest sob reminds me of Melvin Riley (of Ready for the World, dear…
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Continue reading →: Sarah Palin: Behind the prayer shield
This is the only Sarah Palin story I remember posting this year, and I swear it’ll be the last. What else is there to say? Michael Joseph Gross knows: Early in the 2008 campaign, when John McCain’s aides discovered that Alaska-size gaps existed in Palin’s general knowledge (among those previously…
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Continue reading →: Hitchens: White people starting to think like a minority
As effective as Hitchens’ latest column is, it’s not just rote, but my inability to separate my satisfaction in his attacking the right for a change mitigates its impact. Dismissing Glenn Beck’s rally in DC last weekend, he uses a term I’ve long wielded against the misshapen kind of conservatism…
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Continue reading →: Welcome, September
Courtesy of our poet laureate: If it please God, let less happen. Even out Earth’s rondure, flatten Eiger, blanden the Grand Canyon. Make valleys slightly higher, widen fissures to arable land, remand your terrible glaciers and silence their calving, halving or doubling all geographical features toward the mean. Unlean against…
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Continue reading →: Aldo Ray: Brainy beefcake
“Aldo Ray” didn’t exist. The actor born Aldo DeRe never became the star he deserved to be. Maybe agents confused him for a Tad Hunter blond beefcake type. Recognized by audiences now as the moniker Quentin Tarantino gave to Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds, the force that played a character…
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Continue reading →: Blockbusted
The news that Blockbuster Video is in serious trouble is no surprise. I last stepped foot in my neighborhood store in spring 2009 to rent “The Wire: Season Two” again; the store closed three months later. Like most everyone else, the prospect of acquiring a foreign classic or just-released Otto…
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Continue reading →: Happy Saturday
I wonder if Chuck D’s performing this somewhere in honor of Glenn Beck’s March:
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Continue reading →: Singles Jukebox 8/26
As promised last week, the lowdown on Nick Cave: effective for a coupla Birthday Party numbers, otherwise a pompous bore who never got past thinking Poe and Flannery O’Connor are essential literature (for many non-Americans, Southern Gothic seems like such a peculiarity that it must be “quintessentially” American). Also, he’s…
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Continue reading →: Underworld: Kitsch a go go
If the credits had said Hecht-MacArthur instead of Joseph Von Sternberg, I’d have believed the hardboiled writing partnership, authors of The Front Page and His Girl Friday among countless other stage and film classics, directed Underworld, the 1927 silent that kicked off the gangster picture cycle. Beautifully restored by Criterion…
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Continue reading →: Ken Mehlman: He’s gay (yawn)
From the No Surprise File: Ken Mehlman, former Bush campaign manager, comes out: Mehlman told Ambinder that he had recently come to the conclusion that he is gay and was looking to become an advocate for gay marriage. He went public in part because he expected to be asked about…
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Continue reading →: TIME Magazine: For adults only
Time Magazine served its function when I idly thumbed through it while serving in jury duty last Wednesday. The content was such that this report on recent changes is too, too true.
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Humanizing The Vacuum 