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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Tape of the Tail
I’m better than this. I’m better than this, right? Sigh. Who am I kidding? I’m not better than this.
So a photo has been making the rounds appearing to show President Obama, along with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, checking out the posterior of a young woman at the G8 summit. After the photo graced the cover of Drudge, sped around …
There's a Party in Central Park's Tummy!
Because TIME is a national magazine and the Web is worldwide, I try not to post much regional news here. But because Yo Gabba Gabba! is a personal obsession of mine (even though the Tuned In Jrs. rarely watch it now), I must tell any Tuned Inlanders in the New York area that DJ Lance Rock and Brobee of Nickelodeon’s psychedelic-rave …
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, …
Dead Tree Alert I: Michael and the Media
My Tuned In column in the print TIME this week is, unsurprisingly, about the media welter around Michael Jackson. It is, to be honest, basically an amalgamation of my two posts earlier this week about the news coverage of his death and about the memorial ceremony (which, among other things, responded to his media treatment), so if …
Would You Pay to Read the NYT Online?
A couple of reports dribbling out indicate that the New York Times is serious about gearing up to charge people, in some way, for online access. Poynter got its hands on an NYT survey asking subscribers how willing they’d be to pay to read the paper online. Meanwhile, Britain’s Telegraph quotes an NYT exec saying that the paper will …
Dave & Conan: Who's #1? Depends Who Counts
As Bill Carter reports at the New York Times, one side effect of Michael Jackson’s death has been a big jump in Nightline’s ratings, which seemed to come largely from Conan O’Brien. The night of Jackson’s memorial, The Tonight Show got about two million fewer viewers than Nightline, and a million less than Late Show With David …
Corporate Press Release Theater: 16 Newbies Land on Runway
Like a miniskirt, a narrow tie, or some other fashion object that I am not actually hip enough to know whether it’s in or out, Project Runway is returning at long last August 20. Not to be outdone by its former corporate sibling Top Chef, which announced a return date yesterday, Runway announced the 16 competitors for its first …
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 …