Madonna…
..keeps on…trucking. I never had a taste for whatever it is she does. But anyway, she’s still doing it. At nearly 60.
Continue reading →Category Archives: Arts
Racial humor of a different era
It was only 1984. And it was racial humor. But this Saturday Night Live classic is so much more gentle than today’s humor, and I think it’s genuinely funny. Murphy is mocking white people here, for sure, but he’s also … Continue reading →
The Nation’s poetry editors denounce themselves
I’m a lover of poetry, as you can probably tell from the number of posts listed in that category on my right sidebar (as I write this, it’s 161). But the poetry of the last twenty or thirty or even … Continue reading →
Bret Easton Ellis on identity politics
I’ve never read anything by Bret Easton Ellis before. One reason is that I don’t like fiction all that much unless it’s fabulous, and I definitely don’t like violent fiction, which by all accounts American Psycho (Ellis’s most popular novel) … Continue reading →
The disappearing photos
Late last night I discovered that the vast majority of the photos on posts transferred from the old blog to this one have disappeared. Needless to say, that was not a happy moment. I spent quite a bit of time … Continue reading →
Evaluating a president—any president
Commenter “Ariel” addresses these remarks by another commenter in this way: …”but [Trump’s] policies are overall working pretty well” How the hell can you know that? I say this from watching George Bush blamed for the housing crash when it … Continue reading →
Les Moonves: #HeToo
I confess that I’d never heard of Les Moonves before the recent accusations of sexual harassment came out against him. I also have a general attitude against unverified allegations of this type, which I’ve expressed many times before, and it … Continue reading →
Time for jello
I haven’t done a jello post in a long, long time. To rectify that shameful failing, I bring you this [hat tip Ed Driscoll via Instapundit]: Jell-O might be the glistening dish of picnics and potlucks, but for Allie Rowbottom—a … Continue reading →
Come and get those pheromones
“Low-cost pheromones!!” a bot that tried to post today on the blog advertised. I used to get up to 10,000 spambots a day here, the vast majority trapped in a spam filter than I had to clean out several times … Continue reading →
Ballet of the past
The ballet “La Sylphide” (not to be confused with the ballet “Les Sylphides”) is an old Romantic warhorse. It’s one of the oldest ballets—maybe even the oldest ballet—for which we still have the choreography and which is still performed with … Continue reading →
Trouble among the Swedish literati
And I mean big, big trouble. No Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded this year as a result. Pity (that’s sarcasm, in case it’s not clear). That first link I gave is to a very long story about the … Continue reading →
For the Fourth: He’s a Yankee Doodle Dandy
[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repeat of a previous post.] I saw that film on TV maybe 30 times when I was a child. Loved it, and in particular loved the idea that James Cagney—whom I already knew as a … Continue reading →