newcritics

Back in the late 90s, L.A. band, The Negro Problem were once described as a cross between Sly and the Family Stone and XTC. After repeated listens to their second album, Joys and Concerns, I had to admit it was spot-on: melodic funk meets quirky pop. I was instantly a big fan. Those of [...]

Before Vietnam, war movies were either gung-ho patriotic starring John Wayne or philosophically anti-war, starting with “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
This week the Los Angeles Times has been OpEding an argument prompted by a conservative’s contention that today’s Hollywood “stakes out an anti-victory position on the current war in Iraq, continuing its deplorable 40-year [...]

“I still like to go out on a Saturday night and buy the popcorn and watch things explode, but when that becomes such a major part of the choices that you have, when you have 16 cinemas and 14 of them are playing almost exactly the same picture, you feel that something’s going wrong here. [...]

The fall season has begun, which means there are lots of new shows that are re-hashing premises we’ve already seen before. In Moonlight’s case, we are seeing another version of Angel, a vampire turned PI in Los Angeles. It takes the noir concept serious on a superficial level, which is maybe as good [...]

Last Thursday was the great Mad Men fake out, when AMC, without warning, ran a repeat. But we will not be deterred in our journey to see “where the hell this series is going.”
Last week I was interested in how MM was channeling some of the great film directors, from Stahl to Sirk to Lynch. [...]

Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. The first to hear the hum of the siren were those who couldn’t sleep – the ill and bedridden, the mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the [...]

nation’s capital ascends over
trees colored for my dream
along yr highway life
Kerouac is dead at 47
on radio
and McCartney alive
(we lost)
-Jim Carroll, from Highway Report
It’s amazing that 50 years after it’s publication, On the Road remains a book that can create controversy. Its reception to this day is like the concert hall reception that 70 year old [...]

I have my own dreams of the open road.  But although I dream them all with a literary finish—-not necesarily with a Fitzgeraldian passage of interior monologue summing up America and my place in it, but definitely with a writing down of my adventures—my dreams are inspired by driving not by reading about other people’s [...]

Romance & Cigarettes, a movie probably not coming soon to a theater near you, is a messy, juicy stew of a movie about sexual lust—the kind that upends marriages and, in the words of Muddy Waters, “makes a preacher put his bible down.” It also happens to be over-the-top hilarious.
Written, directed, and completed by John [...]

AMC faked us out, and is running a repeat episode. For us live bloggers, that’s just beat. We’ll show up when the next new episode shows up.

Sunday. Like too many others these past twelve months, I was in the Atlanta airport. Minding my own business, but a prisoner. A captive to television stations I don’t want to watch, and canned music I don’t want to hear. ( I could rant for days about being force-fed music and [...]

Bernie Gunther is a classic noir figure: an ex-cop turned private investigator. He has a propensity for worn trench coats and pithy quips and a weak spot for women in trouble. Of course he was a cop in Weimar Berlin and turned PI after the rise of National Socialism. Instead of imagining [...]

In 1949, I was almost thrown out of a theater for fits of laughter while watching the drama of an incorruptible architect who blows up a housing project because someone added gingerbread to his design.
The movie was “The Fountainhead,” based on an Ayn Rand novel with a script by the author, that set new records [...]

Twenty-five years ago today, Princess Grace of Monaco, just as Diana of Wales would 15 years later, died in a car crash, another victim of a Cinderella marriage that ended with shattered glass slippers.
Born Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, she was glowingly beautiful, as movies on TCM still show, and talented enough to win an Academy [...]

I bow to no man in my avant-gardity. My avant-gardedness? My avant-gardicity? No matter, you get my point.
I’m so avant-garde I once did a performance piece where I played Andy Warhol come back from the dead. (Some of my audience felt I was more life-like than Andy himself had ever been.)
I once directed another piece [...]

Earlier today on another blog far, far away Blue Girl suggested that the last episode of Man Men (the best in my opinion) reminded her of far away New York and made her wish she was here. I didn’t see it - even the famed “New Amsterdam” episode (the only other one I actively enjoyed, [...]

The Shamus has crunched the numbers and realized that it’s been 25 years since I graduated from college. I feel little nostalgia or romance toward my university years. My English degree was the biggest scam I ever pulled off, especially since I rarely went to class or wrote a paper before the night it was [...]

Led Zeppelin is announcing a reunion concert in London to benefit the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund. Too bad that even in their prime their concerts sucked like an Oreck. Zeppelin were the only band ever to have had the pleasure of being blown off the stage by Grand Funk. The sound of [...]

Don’t worry darling, we’re living in the future and none of this has happened yet - Bruce Springsteen, Livin’ In The Future, Magic
Click to listen to Livin’ In The Future

Bruce Springsteen has been relevant as a musician and cultural icon since he hit the scene with Greetings From Asbury Park thirty-five years ago. That’s an [...]

If there’s a soundtrack to the dying summer for me so far it’s Bruce Springsteen’s great new song, Girls In Their Summer Clothes– one of the four or so remarkable, Brian Wilson-esque songs from the Boss’s forthcoming album, Magic.
The song is truely wistful, a warm-day-in-September rumination on age and youth slipping by. It opens in [...]

New jazz has receded so far from the commercial center of pop music that these days, more often than not, the best new albums of any given year are archival issues of previously unknown performances by dead giants.
It’s been an enormous boon for jazz fans, who in recent times have gotten their hands on historically [...]

This morning, before Manny and I visited the National Museum of the American Indian’s exhibit on North Pacific tribes, it occurred to me that while some music we hate and some we love, there’s also music we need. At least, there’s music I need. It informs most of my day, every day. For the last [...]

The Siren hasn’t seen Brian De Palma’s Redacted yet. Have you? No? Well, don’t feel bad. Neither have Debbie Schlussel, Roger Simon, Confederate Yankee, Victor Davis Hanson, Michelle Malkin or the guys at Libertas. But they want you to know it’s wicked, evil, designed to make our boys look bad and the Iraqis look like [...]

“. . . and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn [...]

I don’t know about the rest of you, but my own life has been a series of defeats, humiliations, pratfalls, and disasters (and one or two of these have not even been my fault) against a background of tedium, boredom and neurotic dissatisfaction.
Is it any wonder that I am a fan of Extras?
Ricky Gervais [...]

Saw a headline right out of The Onion today: Rock Stars More Likely to Die Early. Yes, it was an actual study conducted by academics in England, the blockbuster follow-up to their famed Drunks More Likely to Suffer From Liver Maladies work. No kidding around, this was a real study:
A study of more than 1,000 [...]

Brian De Palma has made a movie with images to “get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war.”
He calls it “Redacted” to emphasize what the mainstream media has edited out of America’s picture of the war in Iraq. De Palma uses blogs, YouTube posts, videologs on the [...]

How oddly fitting that Princess Diana and Mother Teresa are connected to each other in the world’s memory because they died six days apart in 1997. The coverage of Diana’s death made for a somewhat memorable Labor Day weekend that year, which then rolled right into the coverage of Mother Teresa.
And now, this week, we [...]