I made it out to the Brooklyn Academy of Music last night for the New York premiere of The Magic Flute in the production directed and co-designed by the South African artist William Kentridge. Artists find Mozart’s opera irresistable. Chagall produced sets for it. David Hockney’s beloved designs were a hit for years at the New York …
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Big Sandwich, I Know You're the One
Which is sadder:
(A) The Jam’s “Start” being used in a Cadillac commercial
(B) The Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” being used in a Wendy’s Four-Cheese Spicy Chicken Sandwich commercial
(c) A grown man being concerned about all this?
Extra credit: This is not the first time a Violent Femmes tune has been used in a commercial. …
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What, They Couldn't Just Let Bauer Get Some Damn Sleep for Seven Hours?
Did 24’s producers consider just renaming the series 17 and calling it a day? Last night, 24 took a big fat U-turn, suddenly having Jack Bauer end the nuke threat with seven hours to spare. It was about time; somewhere between the immolation of Valencia and now, 24 became a comedy, rehashing old plots and throwing gratuitous torture …
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BREAKING: Imus in the Morning a Fortnight
It’s not rehab, but it’ll do: MSNBC and CBS Radio have decided to suspend Don Imus’ radio/really-cheap-cable-news show for two weeks, starting next Monday. Sounds like a win-win all around for the warring parties. Al Sharpton and Imus’ other detractors get to declare victory, if a limited one; the media giants cut their losses; and Imus …
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Imus: From Non-Apology Apologies to Non-Excuse Excuses
The needle on the Don Imus Contriti-o-meter took another wild set of swings back and forth this morning. Last Thursday, after having referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos,” the radio/MSNBC host said that anyone who was offended should “relax” about a line that was meant to be funny. Friday morning, after it …
Sol LeWitt (1928-2007)
Arcs in Four Directions/Sol LeWitt, 1999 — San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
I was very sorry to hear the news yesterday about the death of Sol LeWitt, who proved that even Conceptualism could be luscious, that the most parsimonious and disembodied of artistic practices could be a means to arrive at a whole fund of sensual pleasures. …
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"Sopranos! You Go Too Far!"
HBO
The problem with reviewing new episodes of a show like The Sopranos in advance is that you have to do it without divulging any essential plot points, which are kind of important to, you know, understanding what actually happens in the show: e.g., “Bobby coldcocks Tony during a drunk Monopoly game and they nearly kill each …
The Met’s New Greek and Roman Galleries
Earlier this week I took a pre-opening tour of the new Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. (All praise to my cheerful guide Chris Lightfoot, a Met curator of Roman art. When we talk about “digging” in my business, we don’t mean anything as literal as what he does in Turkey.) Just like the Getty Villa in Malibu, which …
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Dead Tree Alert: They Sing America
In the print edition of Time magazine this week, I offer up my last word on American Idol. Except for all the other last words that I’ll be writing in the future, because apparently this freaking show is never going away. Which is kind of the point of the article: more specifically, if American Idol has such a deathgrip on America’s …
The Latest on Fisk and That O’Keeffe
Back to the drawing board. Tennessee Attorney General Bob Cooper has rejected the proposed deal between Fisk University in Nashville and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe that would have opened the way for the sale of the O’Keeffe painting Radiator Building. The deal would have allowed Fisk to sell the painting, part of the …
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Sound Off! Your Top Ten Sopranos Episodes
Every once in a while the Internet surprises you by suddenly coughing up an article you forgot that you wrote. Live on time.com now is my list of the top-ten best Sopranos episodes ever, ready for your perusal and umbrage. As I wrote there, naming the best episodes of a serial like The Sopranos is like naming the ten best chapters of a …
Department of Declarification
The convoluted case of Alex Matter and the maybe/maybe not Pollock drip paintings took a few more turns in the last 24 hours. Matter is the film maker who discovered a cache of what he believes are Pollock drip paintings two years ago. (His father was a friend of Pollock’s.) As I pointed out here, two days ago the New York Times …
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Lostwatch: The Tribe Has Spoken
MARIO PEREZ/ABC
Oceanic Airlines flight 815 crashed in September 2004. At that point, we were several seasons in to the run of Survivor. And yet, amid all the pop-culture references of Lost, no one breathes a word about the show. Come on! Sawyer, of all people, would be calling Hurley “Richard Hatch” constantly.
But last night …