On Valentine’s Day or any day, play these songs for that special someone and your feelings will be passionately clear.
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Survivor: Fiji: What If They Gave a Race War and Nobody Came?
Is it unhip to be blogging about Survivor? Is this, like, so 2000 of me? Fine. I don’t care. You punk kids go play Wii or something.
Here’s what I thought:
* Now there’s a novel idea–what if you cast a reality show with a bunch of white contestants, and a bunch of black contestants, and a bunch of Asian contestants, and a bunch of …
Brits Behaving Badly
They take their art seriously in Britain. The critic Johann Hari, who writes for the British daily The Independent, has done a no-holds-barred takedown of Jake and Dinos Chapman, aging YBA’s — that’s Young British Artists to you –and early Saatchi collection favorites, who have a major show at Tate Liverpool.
Hari’s point is chiefly …
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Murdoch Promises Laissez-Faire and Balanced Biz News
When Fox News went on the air over 10 years ago, it sold itself with the brilliant slogan “Fair and Balanced.” As a piece of marketing, it was ruthless and efficient, in four short syllables saying that there was a problem with the rest of TV news and that Fox was the solution. Now, as Fox gears up to launch a business chnnel later this …
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Dead Tree Alert: Too Cool for Preschool
In the print edition of TIME, my Culture Complex this week is about the burgeoning and horrifying phenomenon of hipster-parent memoirs. Toddlers in mosh pits! Babies in indie record stores! Gen-X parents clinging to their alternative cred with Veggie Booty-stained fingers!
Of course, it’s not a hipster scene without a feud among …
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Anna Nicole Smith, American
Anna Nicole Smith, 39, died today. She wasn’t a TV star, exactly, though CNN describes her as that; by the time she made her reality TV series she was already disturbingly down the path of dissolution and collapse, and it made her show excruciating to watch even for somebody paid to watch excruciating TV. [Update: Biography Channel …
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JPTV: What I'm Watching Tonight
For starters, it gots to be Survivor: Fiji, which by the standards of the previous few seasons has been Stealth Survivor. I’ve seen little publicity for this edition, other than the free PR generated by the unfortunately-timed coup in the host country. Still, I return, even though the show has gotten less and less hip over the years. …
Latin Lesson
I bundled up last night and made it to a preview of the upcoming show at the Museum of Modern Art devoted to Armando Reveron, a Venezuelan painter who died in 1954. It was odd weather for looking at work produced mostly in a Caribbean resort village. And for good measure it was almost all in wintry white. But I knew to expect that on …
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Lostwatch: That's a Long Flight from Miami
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen last night’s episode of Lost, make a small incision in your kidney and don’t stitch it up until you’ve finished watching it.
So: This is the first Lostwatch since the time.com folks turned on the Comments spigot, so I’m counting on you to do the lifting here. But here are my thoughts.
* First here’s a …
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JPTV: What I'm Watching Tonight
Friday Night Lights, in full HDTV glory, thanks to the valiant efforts of Jean from Time Warner Cable, who unlike many cable servicepeople I have encountered over the years, did not stare at my Tivo box as if he were being asked to assemble a particle supercollider. Beyond that–well, we’ve got Lost (already watched, more on that later) …
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Zucker's Viral Vitriol
Monday I wrote about the impending rise of Jeff Zucker to the top of NBC Universal. Yesterday, I made an effort to say something nice about him. Even though he had shown little taste or aesthetic savvy in picking shows for NBC, even though he had presided over a major decline in NBC’s ratings and been rewarded for it, you still, I wrote, …
150 Works of Architecture You Love to Love
As part of its 150th anniversary celebration, the American Institute of Architects released a poll this morning that purports to identify America’s 150 favorite works of American architecture. Being as list obsessed as any other red blooded American — actually, I said that just to get the word American into this paragraph some more — …
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I Watched It In the Newspaper
The most compelling TV of the week is in a newspaper. A newspaper website, to be specific: Britain’s Sun newspaper is hosting the cockpit video of a U.S. “friendly fire” incident that killed a British soldier. The footage isn’t graphic or gruesome–it’s powerful, really, because you see the targets the way the targeters see them, as …