Go Ask Dallas

A brief report from the first day of that conference on “cultural property” I’m attending at Southern Methodist University in Dallas: On the question of how to deal with antiquities, there’s a big division in the artworld. On the one side are the archeologists, who think art collectors and museums should all but stop buying [...]

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David Chase Goes Back to the Mattresses

I’m usually hesitant to link to Time Inc. sister sites because it looks like shameless corporate whoring. And yet it never manages to do anything for the share price. But I think you’ll be interested in this. In an excerpt from an upcoming book, David Chase talks to Entertainment Weekly about That Last Scene: There [...]

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Message re: The Medium

The New York Times’ erudite and funny TV/online-media critic and The Hills booster Virginia Heffernan has a new blog, or a new version of her old blog. The Medium is the new iteration of her blog Screens, which was one of the best things out there critiquing anything involving little pictures that move. (I’ll update [...]

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Star Wars TV: Are These The Droids We're Looking For?

So the LA Times says that George Lucas says that he’s just started work on something that maybe-possibly-just-might-if-it-ever-gets-around-to-happening be a live-action Star Wars TV series. On the one hand, I’m loath to comment on nascent projects like these, which have a way of turning out never to exist. On the other hand, this is a [...]

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Viva Laughlin: Bet Big, Lose Big

Robert Voets/CBS It didn’t have to be this way. I feel compelled to defend Viva Laughlin at least that far–and it’s as far as I’m willing to go–because it’s important to separate the deserved criticism of this truly bad show from the undeserved criticism. Namely, that it was doomed to be bad because it was [...]

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The Morning After: Still in Bloom?

MICHAEL ROBERTS / ABC It’s a deadline day for me, so I’ll leave it to you to weigh in on last night’s TV, especially Pushing Daisies. If the press reports have been correct, this is about the point in the series where Warner Brothers locked Barry Sonnenfeld out of the bank vault to rein in [...]

On the Road Again, Again

And again. I just arrived in Dallas for The Future of the Past, a conference at Southern Methodist University about the continuing controversies over cultural property and just who owns it. Given the developments of the last year or so — the successful claims by Italy for the return of antiquities in American museums, the [...]