August 2010
44 posts
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July 2010
30 posts
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“By and large, Britpop was music that accorded with Damon Albarn’s...”
– John Harris, Britpop!: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock, on building the Britpop brand.
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5 hours, 54 minutes and counting →
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“I liked her calmness, her unruffled sense of herself, her way of standing as if...”
– Steven Millhauser, “The white glove”
After I finish A reliable wife (tonight, hopefully), I’m going to read something by Millhauser. Martin Dressler makes my long list of favorite novels and I don’t know another contemporary fiction writer so enchanting—mesmerizing,...
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“Here we find power pop: at the point where the sincere jangle and thump of two...”
– Michael Chabon, “Tragic magic: Reflections on power pop”
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Enid Blyton's Famous Five get 21st-century... →
prettybooks:
This is awful. Children will read them; they won’t be lost. I will MAKE them.
If children do not know what “jolly” means they could, you know, ASK SOMEONE? OR LOOK IT UP MAYBE?
Nooooo, this is so wrong! (coming from perhaps the only American who bought that recent Blyton bio. no, haven’t read it yet. the type is really, really small.)
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Budget Fashionistas: On Integrity vs. Opportunity,... →
natepatrin:
My interest in defending Pitchfork is partially self-preservational: I don’t like it when people get weird guilt-by-association ideas of who I am and where my tastes are supposed to come from based solely on the fact that my byline appears on a site that has an overinflated reputation.
Amen. Flashback to the other day when the PRR kid (hi dude!) flogged an intro of one of my...
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“In the visual arts anxiety about authenticity is endemic for good reasons...”
– Peter Campbell, “At the National Gallery,” London Review of Books
I don’t know if this is specific to visual art, but it does require a corpse, an artist who isn’t still in the process of shaping, say, what “a Damien Hirst” means (and seriously, Hirst may want to...
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Apropos of, oh, nothing
But if you respond to reasonable criticism (even if you spot logic holes the size of Kansas or don’t personally identify with its ideological stance or are trying to, as HRO would say, promote your personal brand) with JEALOUS JEALOUS YOU’RE JUST JEALOUS!!! you should be banned from writing another “think piece” until you’re ready to join the grown-ups. Jealous is the...
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Liz Phair, rapping →
Bollywood: I can’t even come up with a convincing contrarian reading.
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“There is no ambiguity in “To Kill a Mockingbird”; at the end of the...”
– Allen Barra in the WSJ.
Seems pretty obvious to point out how obvious this book is and sort of lazy not to try to understand its appeal beyond its congratulatory messages and easy-to-parse prose. High school kids—and the millions of adults who regularly reread the book and rewatch the...
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“The qualities that make a ten-year-old a good actor are not those that do the...”
– Bilge Eberi (Bookforum) on the Harry Potter cast
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