While I have plenty of issues with the MPAA’s ratings system, I’m still a bit sad that Jack Valenti has died at 85. Valenti was part of the LBJ powerset, and he instituted the current Motion Picture Association of America rating system. This system, although not overtly censorship, has resulted in some pretty troubling self […]
Jack Chick has been publishing evangelical comic-book-style religious tracts, known as “Chick tracts” for several decades. I grew up in a house with an ironic collection of these — one of my father’s coworkers apparently left them in all the breakrooms at the plant, where my father would pick them up and bring them home […]
In honor of the fact that I’ve had “Baby Got Back” stuck in my head since last Friday, the above is some footage of a 1980 production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance featuring a hilarious Victorian-style rendering of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s famous single [via BoingBoing]. Note that young Kevin Kline is playing the pirate […]
Jonathan Adler’s “Pop” line is a charming set of uh … let’s call them candy jars, shall we? I’m not sure when I first became aware of Mr. Adler, but I know I fell in love with him around the time this line came out. Now, this may or may not be a direct result […]
I’ve been listening to the Grinderman album a lot, and I have to say, it sounds more or less exactly how I would anticipate an album by a band involving Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to sound. If you like Nick Cave and/or Warren Ellis, you will likely enjoy listening to Grinderman. (And, actually, if […]
As though of you who know me will have likely guessed, I’m more than a little irate about today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision. To that end, I would like to point to Bitch Ph.D.’s excellent response, which came to me via the smart-as-a-whip msmsgirl.
Aside from being terrified and frightened by the implications of this […]
Let me preface this by saying that I am very sad about the shootings at Virginia Tech today. I cannot imagine how deeply upsetting an experience like that would be for the people more directly involved, as it’s deeply upsetting to me, and I’m not even involved tangentially.
The video above is to the Boomtown […]
Kurt Vonnegut is dead. The world feels more boring already.
I read in an introduction he had written to one of his novels an anecdote about how he once, while smoking in a bar, answered an inquiry as to what he was doing with the assertion that he was “committing suicide by cigarette.” In the anecdote, […]
I just learned that a piece of film music from Blow Out, the Brian De Palma tribute ot Blow Up is used in Death Proof, Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse. The composer, Pino Domaggio, worked on a number of De Palma pictures, including Body Double, Carrie and Dressed to Kill. The work Domaggio did for these […]
While I find this hilarious, it reminds me quite a bit of the Tori Amos concept album Strange Little Girls — an album that consisted of covers of (mostly) male artists’ songs about women. The title track, which is of course, a cover of the Stranglers song, is below:
Both projects — Alanis Morisette’s cover […]