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My Culture Complex column in this week’s Time (the one with Mike Bloomberg and Arnold getting all cuddly on the cover) is about two personal obsessions of mine: real estate, and TV shows that obsess about real estate. More specifically, the fact cable home shows have gone from focusing on decoration and DIY and become about money, money, …
Okay, I’m back from Venice. If you really need to read more abot the Biennale, here’s a link to my overview piece in the new issue of Time International. Now on to other subjects.
Here’s one. I had a chance recently to preview all eight episodes of The Power of Art, the Simon Schama documentary series that begins Monday night, June …
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By which I don’t mean TV-program-that-is-a-work-of-fiction–I mean a TV program that was fictionalized within another TV show or movie.
Off the top of my head, I have to give the TV-division award to The Itchy & Scratchy Show. They fight! They fight! They fight and fight and fight! Is there any show-within-a-show that better captures …
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I’ll be catching up on last night’s premiere of Top Chef, which I didn’t get around to between Rescue Me and having gone to a screening of Seth Rogen’s Superbad. It’s supergood! Michael Cera’s character talks exactly like George Michael, except he gets to swear. Jonah Hill’s character talks exactly like Seth Rogen, plus his character’s …
My stay in Venice is winding down. (After a week of running around this place, so am I.) For my last Biennale post, rather than offer final observations, I decided to talk again with an artist who has work showing here. Those are the people the Biennale is all about.
Christine Hill is an American, raised in Binghamton, N.Y., who has …
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I just sat in on a conference call with CNN and and YouTube, who are teaming up on what they are calling the “first-ever viewer-generated presidential debates.” The debates (one with the Democrats on July 23, one with the GOP on Sept. 17) will feature questions taken entirely from the public’s online video submissions, which can be …
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We’ve spent a couple of weeks on the season 3 finale here at LDG, so for this week I thought I’d take a different tack, go (slightly) back and toss out one of the bigger questions about the island’s mythology:
What (or who) is the smoke monster, anyway?
There are a lot of subquestions implied in that. If Smokey is an independent …
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The fact that I’m watching Rescue Me’s season premiere on FX tonight says good things and bad things about it. I still like the show enough to want to see where it’s going, but I was disappointed enough by season 3 not to have watched the advance screeners FX sent me.
Rescue Me has always been a hit-big or miss-big show, and its …
The Italian pavilion has a very funny video installation, called Democrazy, by Francesco Vezzoli, a satire of the American (and increasingly, the world’s) political campaign process. It consists of two sixty-second videos — parody presidential campaign spots — that play simultaneously on large screens facing one another in a …
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In 2001, Trey Parker and Matt Stone created That’s My Bush!, a relatively mild sitcom about the new President, and cultural critics everywhere took notice. Was it disrespectful? Could this be good for a nation still divided over the election recount?
Six years later, Comedy Central is debuting Lil’ Bush: Resident of the United States, …
The distinguished thing itself. Isn’t that what Henry James, on his death bed, called death? The distinguished thing is a motif of sorts at this Biennale. The U.S., of course, is represented by the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres. (Though the pavilion doesn’t include his loveliest commentary on mortality, Untitled (Perfect Lovers), two …
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ABC: BOB D’AMICO
Test Pilot is a semiregular feature this summer sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next fall’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But, premature opinions are why God …
Okay, I said I would get back to the Joseph Beuys/Matthew Barney compare-and-contrast exhibition at the Venice Guggenheim. A useful show, obviously. The line between them is as straight as a crooked line could be, and I haven’t seen this just-begging-to-be-mounted comparison mounted anywhere else.
In one room there are artifacts from …
