Tuned In
Mad Men‘s second season debuts Sunday, and my review is in the print TIME this week. It begins:
“Nostalgia. It’s delicate. But potent.” It’s November 1960, and ad writer Don Draper (Jon Hamm), in the first-season finale of Mad Men, is pitching a room of Kodak executives on a campaign for their new slide projector.
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Barack Obama’s interview with Brian Williams was bumped back into the last half of the NBC Nightly News last night… by Barack Obama. In a move the Obama campaign probably preferred—given that Williams again asked him the question of the week on whether he believed the surge in Iraq had worked—NBC gave the leadoff spot to Obama’s …
Earlier this week a conservator at the Reina Sofia in Madrid announced that Picasso’s Guernica had suffered too much damage from previous travels ever to travel again, an announcement that I’m guessing was meant in part to discourage the Basque campaign to have the painting transferred to Bilbao or some other place in the Basque region. …
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TIME’s Rebecca Winters Keegan e-mails this dispatch from J.J. Abrams’ screening of the full pilot of Fringe (see my writeup of an earlier critics’ screening) at Comic-Con:
The J.J. Abrams love is ardent at Comic-Con this year, where back-to-back screenings of his new fall show for FOX, Fringe, kicked off preview night in the San Diego
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The flags were the first thing that jumped out: American flags, all over the crowd thronging in front of Berlin’s Victory Column. If the Obama campaign handed them out, it was a good idea; if Berliners brought them on their own, it was good for him. This was what you wanted to see if you were a Barack Obama staffer trying to manage the TV …
We hear a lot that the future of books is in weightless digital downloads. No more bulky volumes cluttering up your apartment. They must not have gotten the news at Phaidon, the art and architecture book publisher. Over the last few years they’ve been going the other way, turning out a few giant books, volumes much bigger than ordinary …
Tuned In
A bit of housekeeping: I’ll probably wind down LDG, like last year, by the end of the summer–maybe even a bit sooner because (unlike last year) the season 4 finale didn’t set up any game-changer that made for a season’s worth of speculation. Hopefully, ComicCon—which my L.A. colleague Rebecca Winters Keegan will be reporting from for …
Tuned In
ABC’s Charles Gibson got stuck with the hammock slot in the Obama-tour sweepstakes, interviewing the candidate between Katie Couric’s first sitdown Wednesday and Brian Williams’ Q&A, scheduled to run after Obama’s much-touted Hoffnungundanderngespiele in Berlin today. Maybe for that reason—or just because hurricanes trump …
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In my most recent column, I cited Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, who’s running against former SNL satirist Al Franken, as one of the prime examples of Campaign 2008’s campaign tactic: humorlessness as a political strategy. Coleman and his surrogates have steadily been using Franken’s history of edgy/offensive jokes (including one …
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Spoilers for last night’s Project Runway coming up after the jump:
Tuned In
Following on yesterday’s DVD release of Robot Chicken’s Star Wars parody extravaganza, Seth Green and company are planning a sequel:
Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken travels back to a galaxy far, far away to create a second, all-new Star Wars-themed special. Premiering November 16 at 11:30 p.m. (ET/PT), Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II
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A few recent architecture developments loosely connected by the topic of cash:
Shigeru Ban will be doing his first American museum. The Aspen Art Museum, which has been housed for 30 years in a converted hydroelectric plant, has selected Ban to design its new 30,000 sq. ft. facility. (About the size of the typical Aspen ski chalet.) …
Tuned In
…and while I’m on the subject of American media stars touring war zones, I would be remiss if I didn’t share this even more important news: The Hills star (and McCain supporter) Heidi Montag, and her squeeze Spencer Pratt are planning to visit Iraq, with some assistance from McCain’s daughter. (Via Politico.)
Heidi evidently plans a …
