Tuned InUncategorized
Today is HBO day at the cable press tour. It would be impolite to say so, since today also featured presentations by AMC, GSN, Sundance and sundry other abbreviations and nouns. But charmed as we were to see the world’s greatest cat at the GSN luncheon–to promote the network’s airing of the Cat-Minster cat competition, we met last
…
Alice Walton’s failed attempt last year to buy The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins’ 1875 canvas of an operation being performed by a Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Samuel Gross, led me recently to pick up Portrait, the brisk new biography of Eakins by William S. McFeeley, and to take a new look at Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, Eakins’ hard …
Tuned InUncategorized
Television is the most influential and widely enjoyed entertainment medium in the world. Except, apparently, among the people who make and work in television. If you cover TV for any length of time, you learn that people in the TV biz watch, or at least say they watch, incredibly little TV. Especially their direct competition.
At the
…
Tuned InUncategorized
I would have posted this earlier, but the dirty little secret is that even some of us who work at TIME have a hard time remembering it now comes out on Fridays. (Run to the newsstands, people! Run like the wind!) In the print issue, my Culture Complex column looks at the new season of 24, in the light of the charges–which I’ve disputed
…
Tuned InUncategorized
There’s nothing a man likes better than sitting down in an easy chair with a cold brewski and spending a night with the Lifetime network. That, at least, was the message, slightly exaggerated, from that channel’s presentation at the TCA tour this afternoon. Producer Mark Gordon, fielding a question from my colleague Aaron Barnhart,
…
Remember when I promised a few days ago to get off this topic? (“This topic” being how rare it is for artists to do anything with the universal ordeal of flying.) I lied. I’m back to it, but just briefly. Thanks to Jason Kaufman of the Art Newspaper for reminding me that the Swiss artist-pranksters Peter Fischli and David Weiss have a …
Tuned InUncategorized
ESPN’s presentations–the funny promotional ads, the energy, the explosive graphics–are almost enough to make me wish I actually cared about sports. Even the opening panel in ESPN’s morning, about NASCAR–which I should have identified with having survived the slog up the 110 to Pasadena list night–didn’t quite do the trick for me,
…
Tuned InUncategorized
PASADENA — Oooh! I love bylines! Makes me feel all reporter-y!
People who say that being a TV critic involves nothing more than sitting on your can and pretending to care about TV shows don’t know what they’re talking about. Sometimes it involves sitting on your can and pretending to care about the people in TV shows. This week is the
…
Tuned InUncategorized
I’m traveling today to California on vitally important TV-critic business. That means I’ve been spending time on research, such as studying up on the new Transportation Security Administration rules to see if they allow me to bring an In-N-Out burger on a plane as a carry-on for the return trip. Don’t you judge me.
So I haven’t taken …
Tuned InUncategorized
The Apple announcement of its iPhone came today, and was characteristically heralded by TV news with the fanfare reserved for terror alerts and cellphone video of dead dictators or live celebrities. (I’ll leave it to my pal Lev Grossman to explain the details, but apparently you can speak to people on it, even if they are not physically
…
Tuned InUncategorized
Last night on How I Met Your Mother, the five main characters reminisced about how they each lost their virginity. The capper was a fake reminiscence by Barney (Neal Patrick Harris) that lifted the details from the movie Dirty Dancing, which the show cleverly depicted by replaying the "Love Is Strange" scene from the movie, with Harris’
…
Or is it fear of more flying? I promise to get off this topic after today, but in anticipation of a return flight tomorrow that will take off in bad weather, I found myself thinking more about something I blogged about yesterday, how rarely you find contemporary art that’s concerned with the mundane experience of flying and airports. …
Tuned InUncategorized
Pity the poor white person. Held back to a mere 99% of Senate seats and claiming only three of five American Idol crowns, nowhere are we more oppressed than in the hip-hop world, where we must be content with the occasional token like Vanilla Ice or Eminem, occasionally leavened by the self-effacing white minstrelsy of a Weird Al
…
