•Cirque du Soleil, originally from Quebec, may be trying too hard to seem New Yorky with their new show based here: flappers, jazz dance, Vaudeville, urban motifs — and it’s called
Banana Shpeel.
•George Lucas just had to go and “improve” his original Star Wars trilogy with various digital enhancements and lame prequels — but, despite his [...]
Surveying the panoply of classic films easily available to the modern cinephile in advance of the Oscars, I finally watched the DVD of the ensemble rap drama/comedy Krush Groove from 1985 that I picked up at a convenience store recently. It was pretty awesome.
I admit that for me, no hiphop fan, the big thrill is [...]
Ayn Rand’s novel about a collapsing, overregulated economy, Atlas Shrugged, sold over a half-million copies in 2009 alone — and that was over twice the previous one-year record, set in 2008, according to the Ayn Rand Institute. This suggests that the narrative of our economic woes being caused by unregulated capitalist greed has not fully [...]
Our recent (Feb. 3) Debate at Lolita Bar pitted two former members of the Misfits, Bobby Steele and Michale Graves, against each other on the question “Is the Music Business Bad for Music as an Art Form?” Remember the event with us now, with photos by Monty Leman (showing, from left to right, me, Graves, [...]
Chris McDonald’s obvious enthusiasm for his fellow Canadians, the Ayn Rand-influenced rock band Rush, does not stop him from making some very astute, scholarly observations about the ways in which the band perfectly embodies what might be called suburban ideology. This tome does a good job of making manifest things that are almost too [...]
You might say my overarching mission is to remind people that their aesthetic and cultural intuitions are not necessarily a good means of making snap judgments about complex topics like economics and science. Just because you hate the sight of corporate logos doesn’t mean you can conclude that everything government does to regulatorily restrict [...]
This Wednesday, Feb. 3 at 8pm, an ex-Misfits vs. ex-Misfits (conservative!) punk-rock smackdown:
•Bobby Steele of the Undead argues YES.
•Michale Graves argues NO.
•Michel Evanchik (token Democrat) moderates and Todd Seavey hosts. Our debate last month was about “noshing,” this time it’s about “moshing” — so join us!
Voting on the question at the end: you, the unwashed [...]
Actor Ernest Borgnine turned ninety-three yesterday. From the Poseidon to Airwolf, the freaky-visaged actor has served us well. Last year, at ninety-two, he starred in the film Another Harvest Moon.
This reminds me, though, of a likely injustice: Years ago, when my friend Ali Kokmen was in the habit of leading several of us to a [...]
It was naively scientistic 1960s sex researchers — more than hippies in the proper sense — who were targeted last night in Jonathan Leaf’s play Sexual Healing — but thoughts of hippies in general reminded me of the very pro-hippie novel Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, who has a bit of that ecstatic/paranoid Thomas Pynchon [...]
I. Diesel jeans has launched “Be Stupid” ads showing people taking absurd risks — and they probably ought to deploy Weird Al Yankovic’s Devo-influenced song “Dare to Be Stupid” at some point in the campaign. It’s tempting to lament that we’ve hit bottom, to see this as the sad denouement of the anti-intellectual [...]
As if New Englanders sending a Republican to the Senate weren’t exciting enough (in this wonderful week that’s near-simultaneously seen campaign finance rules rightly loosened and Air America going out of business), I see that a Maine resident also threw fox urine on union protesters, which seems like another step in the right direction for [...]
REO Speedwagon is almost the precise opposite of punk, arguably the opposite of rock n’ roll itself. Like a sort of anti-Rush, they’re soft in the places they should have been powerful, nasal in places where they should have been operatic, resolutely bland in the places where some small dash of melodic variety could have [...]
Today being Elvis’s seventy-fifth birthday, I had lunch, or at least a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich, while watching performances by autistic and otherwise disabled Elvis impersonators at the Osso Bucco restaurant near Union Square.
My lunch companion was once a student of theology (and hails from one of the ten most religious states in [...]
Tonight’s deli-themed Debate at Lolita Bar (and field trip to Katz’s) was made possible by a complex happy coincidence: After Josh Neuman of Heeb magazine told me about David Sax writing a book on delis, I was told about Yura Dashevsky, a documentarian chronicling Katz’s, by a nice libertarian couple I met — Steven Warshawsky [...]
You know, I think I’ve found a song even drier and more British than the usual monotone New Wave stuff I attempt, and when you imagine this, I think it’ll make sense to you that I contend this worked well during New Year’s Eve karaoke: Picture a dry, apathetic-sounding Todd (as if there’s any other [...]