Category: Media (Page 6 of 8)

The Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section contains an article this week comparing “Sex and the City” to “The Golden Girls”.

The Arts editor must not read the Style section, because the Times ran an article that came to the same conclusion three years ago this month. (I linked to the first article at the time, too [see June 5, 2000 entry].)

“[Vincent] Gallo has put the heebie-jeebie on my colon and prostate. I am not too worried. I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than ‘The Brown Bunny’.”

—Roger Ebert, putting a stamp on the Ebert-Gallo tiff regarding Gallo’s new movie

Interesting pair of items in the New York Times yesterday.

1. The TV industry is wondering if the sitcom is a dying genre. “A burial plot is being readied for the traditional sitcom—with the formula of setup, joke, setup, joke—that families watched together in large numbers throughout most of television’s history. Despite dozens of attempts, the networks have failed to come up with a new hit comedy since the late 1990’s.”

2. NBC’s fall 2003 lineup includes “Whoopi,” a show starring Whoopi Goldberg as “a one-hit-wonder singer who now runs a small New York hotel. Her attempt at hilarity will be aided by a television brother who dates a white woman trying to act black, and an Iraqi concierge who makes a lot of references to weapons of mass destruction.”

Economist readers: Bill Gates. Bill Clinton. George W. Bush. And Shakira.

“We find that the (extension) is a rational enactment; we are not at liberty to second-guess congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order, however debatable or arguably unwise they may be.” With that, artistic works now have copyright protection for 95 years. The ruling is an approval of the most recent extension of what began as a 14-year term in 1790 and kept increasing throughout the twentieth century.

One cannot understate the news that Senator Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, will be running for President with a fair amount of confidence. Can middle America vote Jewish? Over a good ol’ boy from Texas?

Entertaining, revealing interview with Jack Nicholson in this week’s Entertainment Weekly.

EW You’ve always been pretty popular with the ladies.

NICHOLSON [Grinning] That has nothing to do with me being famous.

“In praise of clutter” in The Economist Christmas Edition. “People spread stuff over their desks not because they are too lazy to file it, but because the paper serves as a physical representation of what is going on in their heads.”

I should have begun regular reading of the Christian Science Monitor long ago. Its reporting and perspective are regularly impressive.

About the Monitor explains the publication in detail. “The idea is that the unblemished truth is freeing (as a fundamental human right); with it, citizens can make informed decisions and take intelligent action, for themselves and for society.”

The New York Times Magazine’s “Design, Everywhere” issue is stuffed with fascinating articles about design in current society. I’ve been reading for two days and I’m still poring through it. Among the best pieces:

A New Poland, No Joke. “In the case of Poland, rebranding is different because the idea came from the government. After years of Communist rule, Poland, rushing to emulate what it sees as modern Western ways, has put itself in the hands of DDB Corporate Profiles, an ad agency whose greatest local success to date has been a beer campaign.”

Not Fade Away. “Sun Choe, a Levi’s designer from San Francisco, comes by the company’s Selvedge store on Mulberry Street, where Troy works. Choe likes the look of the grimy life contained in Troy’s jeans so much that she wants to make a copy of them, distressed in exactly the same way that his jeans are — with identical 3-D ‘whisker’ folds below the front pockets, fades along the thighs and that shredded back pocket.”

The $19,450 Phone. “If you look at watches, pens and eyewear, those are technological products that are essential personal items. I thought that a communications device was ready to mature into something exquisite.”

Driven to Distraction. “We had just spent 45 minutes in a cul-de-sac going over the car’s features, and I still did not know enough to operate the radio by myself. Such is the state of the modern dashboard: in order to fit in every last comfort drivers could possibly want, car manufacturers have made the mere task of getting from one place to the next an ever more complicated feat.”

Irrational Exuberance. “Piecing together its aesthetic lexicon from morsels of Bauhaus rigor and midcentury formalism, with a dash of 60’s Op Art and 70’s shag-pile thrown in for fun, Wallpaper created a hermetically sealed, self-referential world that spun endlessly, glossily around on itself.”