Via Boing Boing, I see that the Canadiian Broadcast Corporation is soliciting mash-ups and remixes of “The Ride of the Valkyries” from Die Walküre, the second opera of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Which is actually weirdly appropriate, since the Ring Cycle itself is basically a massive arrangement of remixes and mash-ups. For the Ring operas, […]

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In response to a proposal that Hollywood boycott Mad Mel, David Bernstein of Volokh Conspiracy wonders why, if this is acceptable, the anti-communist blacklist of the 1950s “remains one of Hollywood’s deepest shames.” He adds: I’m not going to shed any tears over Mel Gibson’s self-destruction, but I haven’t shed any over those poor unfortunate […]

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I meant to mention earlier that I went with Kerry, Ezra, Spack, & Yglesias to check out A Scanner Darkly last week. (You can watch the first 24 minutes online.) It is, as Peter Suderman notes in his NRO review, an extraordinarily faithful adaptation: It’s up there with Terry Gilliam’s take on “Fear and Loathing […]

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If you’re into the disarmingly straightforward, upbeat rock of John Roderick’s Long Winters, you really ought to buy or download their new album, Putting the Day to Bed, which was released today. I’ll confess, I had some reservations after listening to their Ultimatum EP. You know how some bands are really hampered by the studio […]

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First, a shoutout to America’s Future Foundation: Apparently I filled out some questionairre that put me in a drawing for an engraved iPod nano, and won. (I went with “Life without music would be a mistake” for the inscription.) Thanks AFF! Well, it arrived this morning, and as I was running through picking out a […]

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…but I am, in fact, going to go check out tonight’s performance of Bartleby (pace Melville now photocopier rather than scrivener), which is part of the ongoing Capital Fringe Festival. Come along tonight, or wait for my canary-in-a-coal-mine report. Meanwhile,DCist has been flooding the Fringe Festival zone, and having read their review of Short Works […]

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Oy. So, Chris “Day by Day” Muir has learned that, as a rare right-wing cartoonist, he can build a huge audience without ever actually being, you know, funny or particularly artistically skilled, so long as he reinforces his readers’ worldview consistently. Now he’s moved on to a more ambitious feat: expounding on philosophy without having […]

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I caught a late-night showing of Superman Returns with some folk last night, inclement weather having ruled out our usual Tuesday practice of sitting out back playing cards. Haven’t really sorted my reaction out yet, but some preliminary thoughts: This is a pretty, pretty movie. A flashback showing a young Clark Kent racing through the […]

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Jim Henley backs up his contrarian contention that X3 is the best of the X-Men films by tackling the most obvious argument against it: That the movie clumsily cobbles together two distinct plot lines—one based (very) loosely on the Dark Phoenix storyline, and another involving a “cure” for mutanthood (continuing the mutant=gay allegory from the […]

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One lazy evening in my misspent hippie youth, I was puttering about the house when a striking spoken word performance came on the radio—I think it was probably Vin Scelsa‘s old Idiot’s Delight show, but I’m not sure. It was the unmistakable, gravelly voice of Lou Reed doing an updated Romeo and Juliet over dissonant […]

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