Above It All

I recently toured the new High Line Park in New York with the architect Ric Scofidio. Ric’s firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the park with James Cormer’s landscape design outfit Field Operations. If you’re not aware of it, the High Line is a unique park built into the track bed of an abandoned elevated railway line 30 feet above …

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Pawn in the U.S.A.

Next Sunday, History channel debuts Pawn Star$, its new reality show set in a Las Vegas pawn shop. What does selling one’s personal valuables have to do with history? Maybe because when historians write about The Great Depression of 2009, this will be one of the first things the textbooks will cite.

Actually, the fig leaf of …

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The Morning After: Againtourage

HBO’s Entourage returned last night. I’d put up a spoiler alert, but we’re talking about Entourage, so things progress at their own leisurely pace. How leisurely? Enough that Jay Leno is still hosting the Tonight Show. My Name Is Earl is still on the air, and a hit. Perhaps this was the result of a scheduling or production change. …

Shepard Fairey Cops a Plea

The street artist Shepard Fairey, creator of the Obama “Hope” poster, has cut a deal with Boston prosecutors. In February Boston police arrested Fairey as he was on his way to DJ at a party to mark the opening of his big show at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, which runs through Aug. 16. He was later hit with multiple charges …

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The Afternoon After: Big Brother, Still in the House

Last night saw the return of CBS’s Big Brother, which I confess I haven’t watched yet. But what interests me most about the show is simply that it’s still around. When it first began in 2000—the dawn of primetime reality TV—people like me thought it would either blow up huge like Survivor or flame out. It never really did either …

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Dead Tree Alert II: State the Case

Also in this week’s print TIME, I recommend the long-overdue complete series set of The State, which I worshipped on MTV when it started airing in the early ’90s. I had plans to expand on my brief Short List review for the blog. Ah, sweet foolish dreams! Other blog topics, screeners to screen, and print-magazine work demand otherwise, …

Sacha Baron Cohen: Performance Artist

Let’s say that one definition of performance art is behavior that’s been framed in some way to make us bestow meanings on the behavior. Yeah, I know, that’s a definition so squishy you could use it to describe reality tv — which by the way, is also a form of performance art — but, hey, it’s a fluid practice. But if we accept that …

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