New footage has just come to light showing us the full exchange between Papa Bear and his behind-the-camera producer during his famous F-bomb flinging tirade a few years back. Must-see TV, you bet. Every news show needs a producer like that if you ask me. Thanks to CollegeHumor.com for the clip and to JS O’Brien for passing this along.
Read moreThere is nothing new under the sun, or so they say. I’m not a big fan of groups that slavishly imitate their influences, but I do love bands with a sense of history and a desire to explore older styles in search of new angles. This obviously establishes a tricky standard – be true to the masters, but not …
Read moreIn case you missed it, Trent Reznor yesterday released the new Nine Inch Nails CD, The Slip, as a free download. I’ve only had time to listen to it once, and that was while I was working. So I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve been able to give it a few minutes of real attention. In any
Read moreQ: How can you tell when politicians are lying? A: When they say they aren’t. As we wade deeper into the silly swamp that is Electoral Trainwreck ’08 I realize that most nights I wind up giggling myself to sleep. My old friend Disraeli famously observed that people tend to get the government they deserve, and as I’ve noted before,
Read moreOh, my. This is … uhhmmm … I guess this what happens when a crew of Obama’s kids gets a little punchy after watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode #107 ten times in a row. Thanks to Jim Gilliam for pointing this out. I think.
Read moreOne of my favorite musical sub-genres is sort of an off-shoot of trip-hop, a sultry urban electropop district where the downbeat influence of Portishead meets up with all kinds of interesting characters dressed like David Bowie in the ’70s. California pure pop a la Burt Bacharach, for instance, which we find in the likes of Saint Etienne (and the solo
Read moreDon’t tell me you haven’t fantasized about it. HilRod. BaRock. John Dubya McCain (one-half of the Double Talk Express). Three-way dance inside a STEEL CAGE for the USA Heavyweight Title. Yeah, I’m feeling ya. We’re getting there, too. This past Monday night on WWE Raw, all three candidates ran some lame smack for the national cable audience. In case you
Read moreLuke Haines isn’t very well known in America, and that’s a damned shame. He got a little attention here back in the early ’90s when his first band, The Auteurs, released their fantastic debut, New Wave. And then – it was like he never existed. Maybe this is because his music is so quintessentially English – after all, he was
Read moreGive me one last dance We’ll slide down the surface of things You’re the real thing Yeah the real thing You’re the real thing Even better than the real thing I figured out a long time ago, even before I began encountering grad-level feminist critiques, that our media’s stylized construction and portrayal of female beauty was problematic. It’s bad enough
Read moreOur friend at the Niagara Falls Reporter, the Pulitzer-winning John Hanchette, today comments and expands on Denny’s analysis concerning the need for a new business model for news organizations. Denny’s post and Hanch’s follow-on, taken together, represent about as coherent a starting point for the discussion of the future of news as I’ve seen, and while I’m certain that no
Read moreThe header on the story reads this way: CU’s Campus Press Fights for Independence. The subhead is equally on-point: A contentious faculty meeting points to independence for CU-Boulder’s student newspaper — but at what cost? But at that point the journalism train jumps the tracks, because the first couple grafs eschew any consideration of the alleged story itself in favor
Read moreFinal part in a series. How appropriate that a publication whose launch was dominated by photography of the technological wonder of the day should end its run with an equally impressive tribute to mankind’s latest technological accomplishment. As noted earlier, LIFE’s final issue was released a scant three weeks after Apollo 17, NASA’s last trip to the moon, and in
Read moreI used to work with a HAL 9000. Back when I was at US West in the late ’90s we had a voice system into which we would record the day’s company news so that employees without Internet access could dial in and keep up with the latest events. As with any such system there was a dial-in sequence, buttons
Read morePart four in a series. The terrible specter of nuclear annihilation was now clear in the American mind, a condition that LIFE acknowledged and addressed. But in the months that followed V-J Day an odd thing happened, as military testing of the new weaponry provided an opportunity for bomb-watchers to indulge their awe without having to confront the frightful context
Read morePart three in a series. In an age and a culture dominated by scientism, the word “sample†tends to invoke the adjectival “representative,†and I cannot begin to imagine culling a meaningful representative sample from LIFE’s 400-plus issues. Still, it seems important to devote a few pages to what happened with LIFE and technology between the Fort Peck Dam and
Read more
lullaby pit 