Long after any- and everyone else interested had seen it, Robyn & I got the 2003 movie My Architect: A Son’s Journey from Netflix last week and gave it a look. Based on a (for me) outstanding premise—we’re going to learn more about the architect Louis Kahn and his famous friends!—the movie proceeds to disappoint [...]
I closed yesterday by saying I’d draw on some personal experience to try to flesh out the complexities of the Figes “fake reviews” scandal: his “praising his own work and rubbishing that of his rivals,” in the memorable words of The Guardian. I am, by training, a scholar of British & Irish literary modernism, and [...]
Not that I give a rip about such crass metrics, of course, but fakechineserubberplant.com hit the 20,000-views mark today. Huzzah for us all! — K Tweet This Post
This, in my experience, is that very rare thing: a video that explicitly tries to be weird and is, in fact, weird! As viewers of “Fish Heads,” ours is not a “camp” experience: we’re not wiser than the video, seeing in it all kinds of weirdness that its producers didn’t intend. No, they intended it, [...]
You gotta hand it to Lil Wayne: He’s not a man to let a little thing like Rikers Island cramp his flow. Apparently during a blitzkrieg Super Bowl weekend before his internment began, he recorded all kinds of video footage for possible “purposing” into all manner of music video, both his and others’, that might [...]
With the spring semester now but a fond memory, I’m finally catching up on some of my homework. I think I’ve mentioned here that I taught a senior seminar called “Irony in the Public Sphere”; we were interested, mainly, in the sometimes spectacular ways that very compelling and intelligent ironic projects can misfire when they [...]
I’m just back from a week on the road: Yeah, all those fcrp posts over the past week about the homoerotics of the power ballad, and about Jimi Hendrix—as well as Emily Dalton’s piece on bump ‘n’ grinding second graders—werr pre-loaded, scheduled for release as I traveled! The shape-shifting miracle of the Internet. At any [...]
I know, I know: I’ve already written, and raved, about Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video (March 19-20). I’ve also written on fake chinese rubber plant, if briefly, about cover recordings (March 4, 6–7, 10): about how the best of them crack a song wide open, and make available readings of the original previously unimagined. Let me begin [...]
Beloved readers: a milestone, if a silly one. 10,000 clicks on the lil’ clicker thing in the right margin. And we’ve been at this together for something under three months. I know, I know: it really means nothing, I’ve been told. But it means a lot to me, and I’m grateful for your support. I’ll [...]
Nobody wants to read a long post on a Saturday morning, right? Here’s a quick read; you can decide for yourself how long you’d like to spend in replying. Today’s topic: the most annoying grammatical mistakes in rock. I’m not talking here about those grammatical mistakes employed as dialect, local color: “Ain’t too proud to [...]