I’m late with this one. Alas. So, I’ll start by just saying it: the fact that Ricky got cut is really obnoxious and wrong. Sure, this season’s competition is extra-tense and close and all that, but, seriously, Ricky was an amazingly beautiful dancer. He’s off the show and brings with his ejection all sorts of quirks about So You Think You Can Dance? Read the rest of this entry »
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It happens every five years since I can remember. It’s time to remember The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to reflect “as a culture” on its significance, and learn again that it is the best and most important album ever. Now it is forty years. Thanks to Jody Rosen at Slate.com for changing that a bit with a nice write up. I have a few thoughts… Read the rest of this entry »
You know it is a strange day when I find myself in agreement with one of the editors at The National Review. Well, it is strange if you’re me or know me personally, though this agreement is not so substantial. I just like that he made the following comment on Sam Brownback’s editorial in the New York Times: “Here is Sam Brownback talking about evolutionary biology. That’s a bit like saying: ‘Here’s Paris Hilton talking about partial differential equations.’ ” Nice. While Derbyshire is disinclined to respond in detail to Brownback’s “theory” of evolution (though he does, quite well), it is worth a comment. Here it goes… Read the rest of this entry »
I posted a week or so back on the two Flight 93 memorials – one actual, one in plan – in Shanksville, PA. In remembering so much sadness in one site, everything is at stake. This is only more urgent when we consider that this is our memorial, a national site of memory. And so The Weekly Standard’s headline was right to propose this statement, which is then the question answered by the article: “The Memorials We Deserve.” Read the rest of this entry »
In today’s Slate.com, Seth Stevenson writes up a soon-to-appear (as in tonight) miniseries on USA Network, entitled The Starter Wife. Fab write-up. One of my favorite lines, actually: “Having watched an advance DVD of the first three hours, I can offer a mini-review: two thumbs up. Up my own eye sockets.” That’s funny. The review, however, is about a whole lot more, namely, how this show might be pushing ahead a new trend in funding television and movies: single-sponsored work. That just icky. Read the rest of this entry »
13.69: Reading Popular Culture has a fascinating bit on feral women. Why do we want them? What do they say to us about 
desire? Does the wildness of these particular women produce a sexually present woman, or another victim? Well, because she’s a complicated reader of such things, 13.69 thinks of this as both – those are the consequences of cultural desire and material limits. Cultural desire dis-locates the desire, of course, folding desire into the “we” and the “our.” Read the rest of this entry »