The Chrysler Building gets the lyrical treatment for its 75th birthday in today’s New York Times from: David W. Dunlap: “Juke Joint in the Sky”Michael J. Lewis: “Dancing to New Rules, a Rhapsody in Chrome”Charles McGrath: “A Lunch Club for the Higher-Ups”William L. Hamilton: “On Top of the World, Drafting, Dreaming and Drilling”Elaine Louie: “How […]

It’s good to see William Wyler getting his due from Time magazine film critics Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss. In the current issue, they’ve chosen Wyler’s “Dodsworth” as the best flick of the ’30s, along with Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,” Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” Akira Kurosawa’s […]

One of the comments in yesterday’s item struck me as particularly relevant to the death of arts criticism in general: “Mass marketing requires a reductive concept of the human. The aesthetic values of global capitalism by necessity esteem baseness.” Anyone with the slightest cognizance of pop culture knows this by now. But back in 2000, […]

The front page of today’s ArtsJournal points to a story in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times headlined “Critical condition,” about the death of arts criticism. The Times subhead summarizes the gist of the story: “Once almighty arbiters of American taste, critics find their power at ebb tide. Is it a dark time for the arts, or […]

By Jan Herman One day historians will ask how we stood by and let this happen: “He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. … [H]is legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. … When he […]

Norman Mailer is at the top of his game in “On Sartre’s God Problem,” an essay that appeared in Libération, the liberal French daily, which recently marked the centenary of the French philosopher’s birth. Reprinted in the current issue of The Nation, it begins: “I would say that Sartre, despite his incontestable strengths of mind, […]

What do John Cusack, Al Franken, Arianna Huffington, Richard Linklater and Aaron Mcgruder agree on? The winner of A Flash Contest to Stop the Republican Social Security Scam. Go there. Click START. It’s fun. Postscript: Score one for Cusack, Franken et al. The business exec whose theory is behind Dear Leader’s “plan to trim Social […]

There’s a new book out about Buster Keaton, which I reviewed a couple of Sundays ago. If you’re interested, go here or here. Some of what I wrote went thisaway: Like Welles, though in an earlier time and on a different scale, Keaton was a master filmmaker whose creativity was leached out of him by […]

In the mounting catalogue of National Public Radio’s recent troubles the David D’Arcy affair ranks lowest in public visibility. In part this is because D’Arcy is an arts reporter, and arts reporting exists in a journalistic ghetto. The arts hold less news interest for the public and for news editors themselves than politics, sports, business […]

If you do nothing else today, you must watch Bill Moyers’s fucking terrific speech about the accusation of liberal bias made against his old PBS show “Now” and the Public Broadcasting System by right-wing government creep Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Moyers responded to the charge on Sunday at the National […]

Does Greg Palast have influence, or was he simply ahead of the curve as usual? Another possibility: Someone took note of this May 6 item, in which my staff of thousands pointed out that Palast was “pissed off that the American press, unlike the British press, has made so little” of the Downing Street memo […]

Taking care of the nation’s business as usual, our Dear Leader was tooling around on his bicycle at noon yesterday, just back from his globe-trotting photo op, when the terror alert went to Code Red, jets were scrambled, the Capitol was cleared and police told everyone: “Run. Get out. Keep running. … We’re under attack.” […]

City Comforts Blog has picked up on Bill Osborne’s commentary about “the delicate, almost imperceptible line that separates good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence.” Meanwhile, Osborne offers a reminder that Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, November 9, 1938, was almost a year before the start of World War II — so […]

Regarding the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which opens today in Berlin: “I too was struck by Ourousoff’s article in the Times,” Bill Osborne messages. “It was far above what one usually reads in the paper, but one of the statements you quoted yesterday really bothered me: The memorial’s power lies in its […]

Speaking of things German, like the Berlin Holocaust Memorial … Nobel laureate Gunter Grass has much to say about democracy, freedom and capitalism in post-World War II Germany on the occasion of the “Reich’s unconditional surrender” 60 years ago tomorrow: [T]he ring of lobbyists with their multifarious interests … constricts and influences the Federal Parliament […]

Scott Sherman has a huge takeout in The Nation about National Public Radio’s transformation from its countercultural beginnings to its current middle-of-the-road conservatism. “Good, Gray NPR” cites much criticism of the network for its increased corporatization (in both funding and influence) and its promotion of conventional punditry on the toll road to respectability. But there’s […]