I’d meant to mention that I went to check out Built to Spill on Monday, despite having been pretty disappointed with their live show on previous outings. But, as they’re one of my four or five favorite bands, I rather strongly wanted to believe my previous experience was aberrant—and I’m glad I gave them another […]

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I see that University of Texas musicologist Phil Ford, with whom I’ve corresponded a bit in the past about our shared Wagner fetish, has launched a group blog, Dial “M” for Musicology. He’s just finished a series of posts on the Canadian Opera‘s production of the Ring Cycle, which, enviably, he attended.

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You may have already seen the story making the blogospheric rounds about the Texas art teacher whose contract was cancelled because (she claims) parents complained after she took her fifth grade class to a museum containing bare naked marble—in particular Rodin’s “Shade,” Malliol’s “Flora,” and the, uh, not exactly pornographic “Star in a Dream by […]

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I feel certain that someone, somewhere deep in the bowels of your sizable enterprise got through the August issue of Detective Comics and thought: “Dear sweet Jesus, the idea of The Riddler as an egomaniacal ‘consulting detective’ is way too good to waste on some one-shot; this should be a whole series!” This is a […]

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So, I saw a screener of the Sundance-darling documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated with Kerry last week—and my first thought was “not so much rated as overrated.” There are many good points about the capriciousness and opacity of the MPAA rating system, but it’s probably a better op-ed than a film. I’d have […]

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Hi. My name is Julian. (Hi, Julian!) And I’m addicted to Veronica Mars. With that admission out of the way, here’s one thing I find bizarre: The casting directors for a show set in California can’t seem to find anyone, for any of the various Latino roles, with a passable Spanish accent. I’ll give them […]

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Via the battlin’ bloggers of Boing-Boing, a What If? to send your senses reeling: What if Stan Lee had written Watchmen?

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Any journalist or writer can tell you that there are few experiences more apt to provoke the desire to shoot yourself in the face than that of flipping open the latest issue of some national magazine only to realize that some notion you’d been absently tossing around with your friends for six months—or worse, one […]

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I just watched A State of Mind, a fascinating documentary about North Korea’s Mass Games, a spectacle of synchronized gymnastics meant to instill communist spirit. Made with the complicity of the regime, it’s a bit sugarcoated, but plenty of interesting stuff slips through. (One advantage of dealing with a totalitarian system that’s sincere in its […]

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Via Patri Friedman at Catallarchy comes a truly mind-blowing (sorry, mind “boggling”… there might be children reading) 1965 film which some wise soul has put online in full for posterity: Perversion for Profit. Narrated by “outstanding news reporter” George Putnam, P for P is an anti-smut jeremiad underwritten by the “Citizens for Decent Literature,” an […]

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