You know, I mentioned hippie-mocking in yesterday’s entry, and in reading one of next month’s Book Selections, Aristotle’s Politics, I think I may have stumbled across a reference to the first hippie radical (at the start of Book II, Chapter 8):
“Hippodamus of Miletus: A planner of towns, who also sought to plan cities on new [...]
Surveying the accomplishments and failures of 2009 as New Year’s approaches, I’m reminded that a few months ago when I listed books that cite me according to Amazon, one book that didn’t come up but on which I had an influence was the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged. That’s the [...]
Jodie Foster’s next directorial outing will be reportedly be The Beaver, featuring Mel Gibson as a troubled CEO who begins talking to his family only through a Beaver puppet, which the family finds increasingly disturbing — as you also may, after seeing the publicity photo above from it, noted on film site DarkHorizons.com. I [...]
Eugene Hutz of the Ukrainian Gypsy/punk ensemble Gogol Bordello, who I saw perform last night at a densely-packed Webster Hall, is a sufficiently skinny, hyper, unashamedly tacky/goofy frontman — backed by cute sports-outfit-wearing singers in knee pads — that I’m tempted to declare him the Fee Waybill of Ukraine (not to be confused with Johnny [...]
It seems like every time I visit my parents in Norwich, CT, my once-harmless hometown has some new menacing species harassing everyone’s pet cats or even dogs.
We worried about nothing of that sort when I was a kid, then came Lyme-carrying deer ticks, coyotes, a bear or two, and the recent plague of wild turkeys, [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (December 2009):
Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice by James Cabell
Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Descent into Hell by Charles Williams
If proudly amoral people, lesbians in academia, and Christians with a theatrical bent are your idea of a good time — and aren’t they everyone’s? — you’ve come to the right Christmas Eve [...]
Libertarian Republican Eric Dondero posts an essay by Michael W. Dean, singer of the punk band Right Arm of Wyoming, who got sick of criminals, liberals, and anti-gun forces in California and then bought guns and pulled up stakes — a heartwarming tale for the holidays (and in the same week, as it happens, that [...]
I strongly urge you to read the manic interview with William Shatner in the January GQ (on sale now) by Andrew Corsello — and not just because he asked a question about “Rocket Man” at my urging. No, Andrew covers the waterfront and captures the self-referentially larger-than-life quality of Shatner — or “SHATNER!” as [...]
Partying my way across the political spectrum over the past few days (because life is so full of reasons to celebrate, don’t you know) brought me into contact with libertarians, then liberals, and tonight communists. I was on the massive invite list for the Communist Party USA’s annual holiday (??) party tonight at their [...]
Well, the fourth audio clip down here — the one about “Rocket Man” — is GQ’s Andrew Corsello asking the legendary William Shatner himself a question I suggested: how that song, as inimitably performed by Shatner, compares to Leonard Nimoy’s shocking “Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” song (with the video’s self-parodically 60s-ish plug for the United [...]
Lacking TV reception, I have no idea when the official anniversary show airs — and, of course, they started out as shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show — but today marks the actual twentieth anniversary of the first real, half-hour (Christmas-themed) episode of The Simpsons, explaining how they got Santa’s Little Helper from the [...]
More culture: A Norwegian-decay vs. American-hybridization clash and Catholic-pagan tensions are apparently just two of the profound topics raised by the Williamsburg academic conference on black metal’s place in rock, according to this New York Times article.
John Malkovich is reportedly being considered for the role of the villain the Vulture in the next Spider-Man movie — but what’s more important is that the same report says that the villain the Lizard, who has appeared more than once as an as-yet-untransformed character in the films, will not soon make his full, scaly [...]
My praise of Tim Carney’s reporting on cozy government-business financial dealings reminded me of a far lamer but far more common form of reporting: Leftists constantly write “follow the money” articles “exposing” the fact that conservatives are funded by other conservatives who have more money, as if (a) this is surprising and (b) leftist groups [...]
Tim Carney has a new book out on Obamanomics, which is good to hear. Carney, like his mentor, the late Robert Novak, is a reporter first and an ideologue second, and there is far more dirt, collusion, and cronyism than pure political theory to report when it comes to Obama policies.
Carney’s book The Big Rip [...]