There’s one less American art world job open today. Dia Art Foundation announced yesterday that Philippe Vergne, the deputy director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, will come on board as director on September 15. He replaces Jeffrey Weiss, the former National Gallery curator who left the Dia job after just nine months, saying …
Tuned InUncategorized
Strike Watch: More Reason to Worry
In case you missed it before the weekend, my L.A. colleague Rebecca Winters Keegan has a report on the possibility of an actors’ strike in Hollywood this summer, and the reasons for the dispute. One striking arresting detail—a phone war between the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which has a tentative deal with the …
Tuned InUncategorized
The Morning After: YR JONAS REVUS PLZ KTHXBAI
Camp Rock, the Jonas Brothers’ movie / tween excitation vehicle, grabbed 8.9 million viewers on Disney Channel Friday and another 3.6 million on ABC Saturday night. That’s not quite the 17.2 million High School Musical 2 got, but it was better than anything anyone else put on TV all weekend—and considering it was essentially the same …
Tuned InNews Media
Fired for Reporting the News About a Reporter
I knew that Tim Russert died before you probably did. So did not only (obviously) NBC News, but its competitor news channels, who agreed to withhold the news until Russert’s family had been notified and NBC reported it. (NBC didn’t, to my knowledge, ask Time or Tuned In to hold back, but by the time I finished my appreciation of Russert, …
Tuned InRemembrance
George Carlin, 1937-2008
Though he wasn’t mainly known as a TV personality per se, he is forever known for Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV (a routine which, ironically, was itself cited in a Supreme Court ruling on what you could and couldn’t say on broadcast TV). Putting his civil and linguistic libertarianism at the center of his work made him a …
Architects and Autocrats
I was interested to see that the New York Times on Sunday ran a feature about prominent architects flocking to work for not-quite-democratic states, meaning China, Russia, the various emirates, etc. My own, somewhat more polemical take on that question appeared a few weeks ago in the May/June issue of Foreign Policy. On their website …
Tuned In
TV Weekend: OMG JONAS AGAIN
DISNEY CHANNEL
Also in this week’s Time, I have a quick-blurb review of The Jonas Brothers’ Camp Rock, which premieres tonight on Disney Channel:
The Jonas Brothers — those three words being all the review the tween audience needs — get a feature that might as well be titled High School Musical 2 II. (Summer vacation, evil rich
…
Tuned InMovies
Myers' Guru Transcends Mere Unfunniness
Except for the fact that Mike Myers was once on SNL, this has no real connection to TV. But A.O. Scott’s review of The Love Guru has a line so good that I cannot let it go unnoted:
To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth
…
Tuned InNews Media
Dead Tree Alert: The Beltway Vs. The Blogs
My latest Tuned In column in Time arose from some conversations I’d been having lately with colleagues about how much influence new media (blogs, online news, YouTube, etc.) is having in this year’s election coverage as opposed to old media (newspapers, TV news, Time magazine, etc.). This issue has come up in every election since there’s …
Tuned InUncategorized
The Morning After: Thursday Replacements
Most of us probably feel summer rerun season less than we used to, what with the amount of original cable programming, So You Think You Can Dance, the wide variety of Internet porn available nowadays, etc. But the regular season makes its absence most deeply felt on Thursday, normally the night of the highest average television use, on …
Tadao Ando Comes to the Clark
Stone HIll Center, Ando, 2008/ All Photos: RICHARD LACAYO
I was up in Williamstown, Ma. last week to catch an early look at the Stone Hill Center, another splendid little exercise in High Modernism, 21st-century Japanese style, by Tadao Ando, this one on the campus of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. It uses gestures and …
Tuned In
Strike Watch: The "Fall" "TV" "Schedule"
The talk about a possible Screen Actors’ Guild strike if no contract is reached by the June 30 expiration is turning more serious. Reuters reports that the SAG may vote to authorize a strike if the contract expires, and adds that the networks “are quietly considering a postponement of the traditional September launch of the next …
Tuned In
Lost Discussion Group: Wheel of Fortune
So I’ve had a couple weeks to digest the finale now, and I’ve got to be honest with you: I’m not sure I’m liking the frozen donkey wheel. Not the “frozen donkey wheel” in the metaphorical sense, as the code for the surprises in the season finale. I mean the wheel itself, which was in fact frozen. I need to go back and watch that scene …