More sad Christmas news.
Eartha Kitt, who purred and pounced her way across Broadway stages, recording studios and movie and television screens in a show-business career that lasted more than six decades, died on Thursday. She was 81 and lived in Connecticut.
Sad Christmas news.
Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London.
Slate: The Best Music of 2008
New York Times: The Buzzwords of 2008 (Very proud of WeBFF Jim Groom and edupunk!)
Medialoper: Musical Moments to Die For
Independent Weekly (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill): 40 Best Songs of 2008 (with mp3s)
The Morning News: 2008 by The Writers
The A.V. Club: The Worst Films of 2008
Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies: Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008
Wuthering Expectations: Best Books of the Year (Nineteenth Century Edition)
LA Times: Top 10 Movies of 2008
Jezebel: Elisabeth Hasselbeck's 25 Most Annoying Moments of 2008
Time Out New York: Books - The Best (and Worst) of 2008
Regret the Error: Crunks 2008 - The Year in Media Errors and Corrections
Amazon: Top 100 Books of 2008
Seed: Seed Picks 2008
Grammar Girl: Top Five Pet Peeves of 2008
Frisky: The Best Male Bloggers of 2008
The Smoking Gun: 2008 Mugshots of the Year
The New Yorker: 2008 - The Year in Fiction
"Needing someone is like needing a parachute. If he isn't there the first time you need him, chances are you won't be needing him again." - Scott Adams
Lisa Spiro has a very interesting post on using Google Books to research publication history.
The AV Club interviews Darren Aronofsky.
AVC: So, more pop psychology for you: Why do people want to watch wrestling and violence, but not deal with a film that has to do with death?
When I was driving downtown for the Toni Morrison event last month, I passed Bob Baker's Marionette Theater, a building I had never noticed before under an overpass along Glendale Boulevard. It reminded me how often LA can surprise like that, popping up a Marionette Theater where you least expect it. As often happens, suddenly Bob Baker's Marionette Theater was everywhere. The LA Times featured an article on the financial problems Baker is facing about a week later.
The Bob Baker Marionette Theater is a place that is both magical and earth-bound. Operating from the corner of 1st Street and Glendale Boulevard just west of downtown Los Angeles for 49 years, it is a vestige of childhoods lived, where vegetables dance to old vaudeville tunes and musical instruments dance and jump across a black box theater festooned with crystal chandeliers...But it's also been struggling for years, trying to eke out an existence on $15-a-head admission, amid the fickle nature of children's passions. Last week, reports began circulating that the theater was in trouble. A manager sent out an e-mail saying that Baker had been the victim of "an elaborate mortgage fraud operation bent on stealing his theater and home" and asked fans of the theater help pay nearly $30,000 in past due mortgage payments on the two buildings. If the funds weren't raised, the manager said, the buildings would be sold "and Bob and his thousands of puppets will be homeless."
About a week after that, the New York Times followed suit, suggesting a bailout for the puppet show.
There are many ways to measure California’s tanking economy: an 8.2 percent unemployment rate; a multibillion-dollar state budget gap; threatened endowments of the city’s museums, causing some cultural institutions to nearly default on mortgages; and the continued weakening of the Hollywood studio system. But the meltdown of the marionettes may say it all.
In this Nutcracker season of sugarplum dreams, maybe Santa will find some cash in his sack for the Marionette Theater.
David Bennum makes the argument that Canada rocks harder than the U.S.
Since then, wave after wave of excitement and innovation—punk, post-punk, indie, hip-hop, house, techno, grunge—has surged back and forth between America and Britain. Generations of Canadian hipsters have gazed enviously at those two countries, and groaned in embarrassment as their compatriots instead embraced progressive rock and its geeky offshoots. Asked to name a globally successful and recognisably Canadian band, until recently most non-Canadians might have cited Rush, the stupendously overblown pomp-rockers. Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, Avril Lavigne and Nickelback have conducted their blockbusting careers as undercover Americans.
But just as it did for British pop in the early 1960s, all that outward scrutiny, that eager consumption by ambitious, dissatisfied youngsters of the fresh and thrilling from abroad rather than the second-rate and derivative at home, is paying dividends. There is no particular Canadian sound. Even as media ubiquity shrinks our world, the sheer geographical vastness of Canada makes such a thing improbable. What we are seeing—and hearing—is a new-found confidence. Canadian acts at last have the wherewithal to make music without a sense of obligation or apology; and without the ingrained assumption that a Canadian artist must either pander to the United States or settle for being at best a local hero. Pound for pound, no other country’s music scene is punching harder.
Via Condalmo, this Billie Holiday video was recorded five months before her death at age 44. I never realized how much visuals would add to the pure horror of this song.
Zadie Smith reflects on her father's death and the comedy legacy he left to his family.
Left unchecked, comedy snobbery can squeeze the joy out of the enterprise. You end up thinking of comedy as Hemingway thought of narrative: structured like an iceberg, with all the greater satisfactions fathoms under water, while the surface pleasure of the joke is somehow the least of it. In my father, this tendency was especially pronounced. He objected to joke merchants. He was wary of the revue-style bonhomie of the popular TV double act Morecambe and Wise, and disapproved of the cheery bawdiness of their rivals, the Two Ronnies. He was allergic to racial and sexual humor, to a far greater degree than any of the actual black people or women in his immediate family. Harvey’s idea of a good time was the BBC sitcom “Steptoe and Son,” the grim tale of two mutually antagonistic “rag-and-bone men” who pass their days in a Beckettian pile of rubbish, tearing psychological strips off each other. Each episode ends with the son (a philosopher manqué, who considers himself trapped in the filthy family business) submitting to a funk of existential despair. The sadder and more desolate the comedy, the better Harvey liked it.
Is Jonathan Franzen clairvoyant?
The names George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden don't appear once in Jonathan Franzen's novel "The Corrections." And yet the book, which was published on Sept. 1, 2001, anticipates almost eerily the major concerns of the next seven years. Franzen conjures up a nation kept awake at night by nameless dread. The second sentence of the book: "You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen." Something did, of course—but anyone who revisits "The Corrections" now will be reminded how many of the preoccupations we've labeled as "post-9/11," or "Bush era," in fact predate both. In his story of the Lamberts, a Midwestern family with three adult children who resist their mother's hysterical insistence that they make it home for one last Christmas, Franzen lays out many of the themes that would come to dominate the millennium's first decade: global warming, economic recession, HMOs, psychopharmaceuticals, viral marketing, Eastern European instability, even the organic-food movement. (Just one trivial, but spot-on, example: Denise, the daughter, who is a chef, investigates "the Smith Street culinary scene in Brooklyn." Fast-forward seven years, to July 9, 2008, and you'll find an article in The New York Times about "the culinary flowering of Brooklyn," centered on Smith Street.)
Village Voice: The Best Books of 2008
Sasha Frere-Jones: The Best Recordings of 2008
Edward Champion: Top Ten Books of 2008
New York Magazine: The Year in Culture
Merriam-Webster: Words of the Year 2008
Salon: Salon Book Awards 2008
New York Post: The Best Films of 2008
"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be a fish." - Ovid
In her trademark raven bangs, spike heels and killer curves, Ms. Page was the most famous pinup girl of the post-World War II era, a centerfold on a million locker doors and garage walls. She was also a major influence in the fashion industry and a target of Senator Estes Kefauver’s anti-pornography investigators.
But in 1957, at the height of her fame, she disappeared, and for three decades her private life — two failed marriages, a fight against poverty and mental illness, resurrection as a born-again Christian, years of seclusion in Southern California — was a mystery to all but a few close friends.
Read more from The New York Times...
A cult figure, Page was most famous for the estimated 20,000 4-by-5-inch black-and-white glossy photographs taken by amateur shutterbugs from 1949 to 1957. The photos showed her in high heels and bikinis or negligees, bondage apparel -- or nothing at all.Paul Greenberg suggests a bailout for writers and Ed Champion urges freelance writers to stay writing.
