The interstitial images, or “bumps” on Cartoon Network’s late-night Adult Swim bloc are often more interesting than the shows themselves. I found the one above inexplicably disturbing and poignant: It shows a deer with its eyes gouged out beside the text “When did you stop remembering?”

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One of the things that initially drew me to Mike Doughty‘s music, way back when he was fronting Soul Coughing, was the way he used alliteration (or stabreim for the Wagnerians out there), internal rhymes, and unusual rhythms to make not just the voice, but also the language serve as an instrument. The line off […]

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Slate’s belated obit for comedian Mitch Hedberg has a few clips of him in action. Wikipedia’s page also has a good roundup of some of his bizarre koans.

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Just in case anyone cares, I find I’m unsually happy with the stuff that’s recently been playing over and over on the ol’ iPod: The Long Winters: The Worst You Can Do Is Harm and When I Pretend to Fall Rilo Kiley: The Execution of All Things Metric: Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?

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I saw Margaret Cho doing stand-up at the Warner Theater last night before making my way to an aptly-named “Scantily Clad” party. She was generally pretty funny, but there was one aspect of the act I found sort of befuddling. At numerous points, she’d just throw out some policy position—”The death penalty is wrong”; “Why […]

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The Decemberists—whose show this Friday I’m ultra-psyched for—are on All Things Considered this afternoon; check it out. In a related vein: I note that both they and the Dresden Dolls have a certain self-conscious Brecht/Weill feel to their music. One more and I’ve got the requisite journalist’s three for a full-blown trend. Nominees?

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Sorry, that was the sound of a minor orgasm. The trailer for Serenity, the Firefly movie, is now online.

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As I mentioned in a previous post, the Chicago Ring, originally August Everding’s, wasn’t quite some super-stripped down avant garde Sprockets affair of the kind Wieland Wagner was so fond of, but it was also quite a distance from the hyper-realistic Schenk stagings I’d seen at the Met—a multicultural, Flash Gordon-slash-Tron affair with an eclectic […]

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Two things that I’ve found myself wondering about: First, who is the father of the Rhinemaidens, the one who entrusted them with the Rhinegold, told them how it could be fashioned into a ring of power, and warned them about “such a foe” as Alberich? I guess in the back of my head I’d thought […]

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At the risk of appearing to give credence to various imbecile popular analogies between gay marriage and other highly disanalogous couplings (“man on dog,” etc.) the argument between Wotan and Fricka in Die Walküre began to sound a touch familiar on Tuesday night. Fricka is outraged that Sieglinde has abandoned Hunding (whom she had been […]

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