Tag Archives: entertainment

TunesDay: NIN, Lefsetz and the realities of Net success

In 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

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TunesDay: Ooh la la

One 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

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Saturday Video Roundup Smackdown: if you smellllllll … what BaRock … is cooking

Don’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

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Even better than the real thing: mass media and manufactured beauty

Give 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

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My god – it’s full of stars: 2001, Frankenstein and autonomous technology

I 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

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TunesDay: The divine stupidity of Dick Valentine

The serious bands get all the respect. All the critical acclaim. All the love from all the right people. Which is probably as it should be. But for every Beatles there’s at least one or two Rolling Stones, bands that aren’t terribly respectable and that clearly aren’t worried about cultivating an intellectual legacy. Sometimes you even get a little Beatles

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Saturday Video Roundup: the best of music video, part 2

Last September we hit you with part one of our best music videos ever, featuring Death in Vegas, The Prodigy and Pop Will Eat Itself. Powerful stuff, to say the least. Today we’re back with round two – alieNation. Up first is Orbital’s “The Box.” I used this one in a class or two back in the late ’90s. Humanities

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