I had a chance last week to spend a couple of days going over the wonderfully intricate new Olympic Sculpture Park that Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi of Weiss/Manfredi designed for the Seattle Art Museum. The park, which slopes down to the waters of Elliott Bay, is actually located about seven blocks from the museum, which in May …
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Why Don't They Watch NBC on The Office?
Great episode of The Office last night. (As for the overhyped musical episode of Scrubs, go here to hear it done right. And Joss Whedon wrote the music himself, instead of hiring pros.) Yet again, I’m amazed at the attention to detail in this sitcom. There are no blank spaces; the characters seem to be thought out down to the atomic
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Deja Vu All Over Again 2
There’s just something about Angelina Jolie that makes people think “Madonna”. The Madonna in the Bible, not the Madonna who adopts African babies, just like Angelina. (Though come to think of it, sometimes Angelina makes people think of that Madonna too.) In any event, the painter Kate Kretz generated some press and blog chatter …
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Isaiah Washington, Part 2: What the F Is the Problem?
I have not exactly been a defender of Isaiah Washington lately. But I have to kinda-sorta come to his defense–or at least criticize one of his critics. At the Golden Globes, he denied–implausibly, if you believe his costars–having used a slur against gay Grey’s Anatomy costar T. R. Knight last fall: "No, I did not call T.R. a faggot.
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Here Comes the Neighborhood
With the rise of “starchitects” it’s become a well understood strategy for developers to seek out the starriest and attach their big names to any project that might be controversial because of its size or location. Actually, it’s a practice that long predates starchitecture. As far back as the late 1950s the developers of what would …
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My Cat's Breath Smells Like Cat Food–Right After Your Local Weather!
NBC is reportedly planning to make the Today show run for four hours. Four. 240 minutes. I am deeply disturbed by this, not because I am a particular fan of Passions, which the double-super-sized morning show will supersede, but because the move threatens to break physical laws.
Let me explain: By the usual pattern, each hour of a
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The McWall of McSilence McCrumbles
It took months, but Grey’s Anatomy cast members have finally come out and said what previously you were only allowed to kinda-sorta suggest and imply: that Isaiah Washington did, in fact, use the word "faggot" in an on-set argument with Patrick Dempsey. Since reports of the altercation–and the subsequent outing of gay costar T. R.
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I Saw a Film Today, Oh Boy
Sleepwalkers, Doug Aitken’s large scale video projection onto the outside walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York premiered Tuesday night. It was a disappointment. Aitken’s piece consists of five separate silent narratives, all of them projected simultaneously, each following the same general arc over the course of its 13 …
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You Don't Know Jack, Part 2
People* have been wondering if I want to add any more to my current column–which argues that 24 is not the right-wing tool some critics say it is–in the light of last night’s episode, where a suitcase nuke blew up in suburban L.A. Some detractors–or at least those that ABC News coaxed knee-jerk reactions from–say the blast went too
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More Da Vinci Decode
I wanted to briefly revisit the subject of my last posting, about the announcement that the Italian art researcher Maurizio Seracini will resume his attempt to determine if completed portions of The Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo’s never finished and long lost masterpiece, might be hidden behind a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. …
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Lost: Booking Its Return Flight?
I opened my mail this morning and found a DVD of the first episode of Lost after its hiatus, which tells me–actually, let’s linger on that point a minute. I have the new Lost. I have the new Lost. I got the new Lo-o-o-ost, and you ain’t got none, nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah…
OK, now that I’ve got it out of my system: I rarely get
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Idol Wins Idol
American Idol returns tonight, and last night’s Golden Globes could not have been a better promotion for it had the awards been held on Fox. The Globe for best supporting actress in a film went to Idol also-ran Jennifer Hudson for her work in Dreamgirls. And not to take anything away from Hudson’s acting, but let’s face it, in large
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Da Vinci Decode?
In Florence last October I had a chance to catch a fascinating show about Leonardo da Vinci at the Uffizi Gallery. It focused in one part on The Battle of Anghiari, the never completed mural by Leonardo that has been one of art history’s most bitterly regretted lost works since it disappeared in the mid-16th century. In anticipation of …