I didn’t want to let the week run out without a farewell to John Updike, the Great American Novelist who died on Tuesday. Updike was also a lucid and lyrical writer about art. As a young man he actually thought he might want to be a painter, or maybe a cartoonist, and after getting his English degree at Harvard he put in a year at …
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Super Bowl Advertisers: Please Don't Feel My Pain
We’re two days away from the big game. As I’ve made abundantly clear, I’m not a big sports fan, but I’ve been hearing this one’s looking like a potential blowout, which is not great news for NBC.
It’s also the big game for American consumer marketing, and as we all know, that competition has been a blowout for months now. Stuart Elliott …
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Dead Tree Alert: Blago Talks!
In the new print TIME, my Tuned In column looks at the now-former governor of Illinois’ media tour this week:
It is somehow perfect that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich would begin his media self-justification-and-jury-pool-influence tour at the same time that American Idol has returned to TV. Like the bad auditioners who spring anew
…
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Simon Defeats Katie
Why don’t more people watch the evening news anymore? One commonly blamed culprit is schedules. People are busy at 6:30! Gotta work late! Soccer practice! Put the news on later, when people are home, the thinking goes, and they’ll have time to tune in.
Except that then, they want to watch American Idol. Last night, CBS experimented …
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What Will You Put on Your Face for TV's Sake?
I’m preparing for my annual Super Bowl Ad review extravaganza this Sunday night (in which I TiVo the game, watch and review every ad on the spot, and fast-forward through the entire game itself; the reviews usually post, with video, early Monday morning). As part of that, the good folks at DreamWorks and Pepsi sent me 3-D glasses to use …
Curiouser and Curiouser
Things get ever more complicated in the uproar over the decision by Brandeis to shut down its Rose Art Museum and sell — or not sell — the art to raise money to cover a budget shortfall at the school, which has seen its endowment decline by about 25%.
Let’s start from the beginning. On Tuesday the school issued a statement that it …
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I Have Seen Another Episode of Dollhouse
When I screened the pilot of Joss Whedon’s upcoming sci-fi series about humans with erasable memories, the subsequent post got picked up and eagerly pored over within the Whedonverse. So I feel a kind of obligation to my public, and to my traffic reports, to note that Fox has sent me a second episode.
I’m going to be a bit of a tease …
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Kimmel vs. O'Brien?
Here we go again. The New York Times is reporting that ABC has considered the idea of moving Jimmy Kimmel into Nightline’s 11:35 p.m. slot to compete against Conan O’Brien, when Conan assumes Tonight from Jay Leno (and Jay Leno assumes 1/3 of primetime from the NBC entertainment division).
So far, the scuttlebutt—
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The Morning After: Life on Mars Is Back, Damages Still Here
I watched the first three episodes of Damages last month; now that we’re into the thick of midseason TV and FX has aired the fourth, I am officially behind. I’ll get to it eventually, but am throwing the thread open for anyone who wants to dissect it.
Also last night saw the post-Lost return of Life on Mars, with an appearance by …
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Lostwatch: Explosive Revelations
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, fill it with lead, encase it in concrete and bury it until you watch last night’s Lost.
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There's the Death of Print, and Then There's the Death of Print
Word is just out that Domino magazine is going out of business. That sucks. Domino was an unabashedly consumerist magazine (it was the home-design sister to shop-centric Lucky magazine), but it never felt like a glorified catalog; it had taste and an aesthetic and tight but well-thought-out features. (My favorite, well, is still around, …
Top 10 John Updike Books
American literary legend John Updike died in 2009. TIME chose the prolific author’s most memorable works.
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A New Movie Channel: Genius Move, or Epix Fail?
I had forgotten that the new cable movie channel from Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate was coming, but it still is, and it reportedly now has a name: Epix. But the New York Times reports that it’s having a hard time finding a cable distributor.
How could that possibly be? Could it have anything to do with the fact that there is not a …