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Continue reading →: Don’t mix vodka and Red Bull
The Scissor Sisters are a pretty good idea whose cultural moment came in 2002 or 2003, when American required a gay disco-punk band and got the DFA axis instead. My problem lies with their vocals, which are rather tame for an act this determinedly camp. I’m more disappointed that Night…
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Continue reading →: On Christgau
Browsing at a long-gone superstore called BookStop (the logo was an actual stop sign) in the fall of 1992, I found a canary yellow paperback by one Robert Christgau, a collection of reviews the author published in the eighties. I flipped to the entries on two of my beacons, Peter…
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Continue reading →: Singles 7/1
In probably the busiest singles week of my tenure, I really got everything: two of the best singles of the year (in next week’s batch, Ne-Yo will have appeared on another), some middling efforts by comers (Kelis) and has-beens (guess I’m glad I didn’t pay forty bucks to see Crowded…
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Continue reading →: Welcome, July
There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons – That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes – Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the Meanings, are – None may teach it – Any – ‘Tis the Seal Despair – An…
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Continue reading →: Treating pregnant women with steroid to prevent lesbianism
You read that right. The researcher is associate dean for clinical research at my university: Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University, and her long-time collaborator, psychologist Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg, of Columbia University, have been tracing evidence for the influence of prenatal…
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Continue reading →: Village of the Damned
Black and white photography as rich as Christian Berger’s in The White Ribbon is as much a triumph of legerdemain as it is of lighting; the imprimatur of black and white in a post-Ted Turner world signals seriousness of intent. Very serious. Michael Haneke is no Judd Apatow. He’s a…
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Continue reading →: “I have a bit of a paranoid streak”
Laurie Anderson, in an interview with Rob Harvilla, still showing she understands the nuances of language: That administration, the Bush administration, was a very story-savvy one. They knew what they were doing when they paired a ridiculous word like “homeland,” which nobody uses—no American would say “homeland”; it sounds like…
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Continue reading →: Hope I die before I stay young: on listening to music
Lots of stuff to digest in this ILM thread addressing what must look like a precarious situation to a twentysomething still infatuated with music: what happens when the consumptive urges inevitably wane with age, partners, and children? Created, naturally, on the same day as this thread about harshly judging people…
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Continue reading →: Love stinks
In yet another example of a film “about” a novelist made by people who’ve never read a novel, The Last Station exists as a vehicle to get costume designers, Helen Mirren, and Christopher Plummer a bunch of Oscar nods. Less risible a notion, however, than accepting the shouted drivel about…
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Continue reading →: What are you putting in that box?
Like riding a bicycle without training wheels and my first lust-driven erection, separating myself from toys was supposed to be one of those milestones. I didn’t mean a single word when I imperiously told Mom on Christmas 1987 that the Transformer I’d gotten was “the last one.” I started high…
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Humanizing The Vacuum 