newcritics

YOU READY? YOU READY? YOU READY?
Cuz we’re going to do our best to bring SexyBack tonight. Just a little nod to the boy who I think is going to be Mr. Grammy tonight. Justin Timberlake.
I have a confession. I really like that song “SexyBack.”
Yeah!
My son and The Skimmer — they’re [...]

[This is my first post here at New Critics. I originally posted this over at my place back in November of '05, but I thought it was as good a place as any to start.]
I was introduced to the music of The Allman Brothers Band in about 1972, after the year-apart tragic [...]

There are four excellent reasons for you to watch Hollywoodland that have nothing to do with whether or not it’s a good movie, which it isn’t.
One. You grew up watching The Adventures of Superman and George Reeves, whose story the movie tries to tell, will in your heart of hearts always be your Superman [...]

I was a really cool baby.  My first words were … Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. 
As in She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah…  She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah…  I stood in my crib, with my little moptop, bouncing up and down singing Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.  First words!  It’s true.  My mom has it written down [...]

Molly Ivins is dead.
Molly Ivins, the acerbic-witted thorn in the side of every dirty political pimp, playa and ho is dead.
Molly Ivins, the conscience of Texas politics, who followed the man she called “Shrub” from Austin to Washington, never letting him fart in a broom closet without calling him on it, is dead.
Molly Ivins, [...]

I belong to that white, suburban, middle class, middle-aged cohort that finds Norah Jones irresistible. We’re the kind of folks who still buy CDs instead of trading ripped files, so it’s unsurprising that Jones’ third CD, Not Too Late, debuted this week at the top of the Billboard charts.
There are a few reasons why Jones [...]

I’ll be honest, as a political blogger I rarely find documentary films on political subjects successful. I rarely see the level of nuance, persuasion, and emotional pull in the works of Michael Moore and Robert Greenwald that I’d like to see, even if I find their works transparently powerful. I’ll readily admit that this [...]

Arrowsmith (1931) is a fine example of the fact that, auteurism notwithstanding, you can’t judge a film by its pedigree. This one, based on Sinclair Lewis’s Pulitzer-winning book, had John Ford directing, Sidney Howard writing the screenplay, Samuel Goldwyn producing and a cast that included Ronald Colman, Helen Hayes, Richard Bennett and Myrna Loy. And [...]

At fifteen, I was obsessed with East of Eden.
Like Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, and A Farewell to Arms, the book was a gift from my mom. I’m convinced she passed it along in part so we could pass our time stuck in traffic by identifying similarities between my father and Steinbeck’s feral sociopath, [...]

Just a month ago, newcritics hit the feed-stream as an experiment: could a few bloggers come together to write about culture without killing each other. The answer, a month in, is a Beatle-like yeah. Not the bouncy 1963 “yeah!” but more a 1969-style, slouching “yeah…” Followed by “man.” Which is perfect really, because this is [...]

How’s that for counter-programming to SB XLI ? Before the current spotlight fades on Hardy, I wanted to note his poetry. Like Robert Graves, his first love was his poems, not the novels that paid the bills.
I don’t remember when I first read Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain—Lines on the loss the Titanic,” [...]

Watching Anthony Kiedis sleepwalk through the motions while the rest of the Red Hot Chili Peppers delivered a technically brilliant and emotionally spirited set last week in Tampa, the mind of this 44-year-old rock fan turned to an elder of the genre. There were times when the lead Chili (also 44) acted like Iggy Pop, [...]

I was going through my email yesterday morning in the kitchen listening to WEHM over the Internet (via our Sonos system) and came across an email from Tony Alva with a link to Bob Lefsetz’ Radio Last post.
Sanyo Transistor Clock Radio, 1960’s - Originally uploaded by Roadsidepictures
The Lefsetz post really isn’t about radio, it’s [...]

You know that we do take away,
We deliver too.
Open twenty four hours babe,
Just waiting on a call from you…

Thru and Thru is a Keith Richards track David Chase dug out from the obscurity mine of post heyday Rolling Stones albums for his hit HBO series The Sopranos. He let the tune play over the [...]

There is a new biography of Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin that has been well reviewed. I like when new work comes out on a classic writer because it turns a million eyeballs to that name, if just for the length of reading a review. It jogs our collective memory of dusty parts of [...]