Category

criticism

• criticism

  essential reading for 11.11.08

  11.11.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  In Slate: Ron Rosenbaum on Jeff Jarvis.
  Worth reading for most anyone interested in the debate on how technology will affect journalism, book publishing, and — for lack of a better word — print.

• Music, criticism

  praise / burial

  08.29.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Paper Thin Walls has called it a day. Something of a retrospective is now up.
  I’ll miss it. Not only because I did a fair amount of writing for it, but because it cultivated a style of honed-in music writing that I daresay doesn’t exist anywhere else.
  Plus, this was pretty damn funny.

• Film, criticism

  in which critics address the same cultural phenomenon from very different angles

  08.13.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Reading Manohla Dargis’s review of Tropic Thunder today, I found myself getting thematic echoes of the work of another acclaimed New York-based critic. The topic came in the review’s last paragraph, focusing on the character played by Tom Cruise:
  What’s most notable about the film’s use of blackface is how much softer it is compared with [...]

• Internet, Politics, criticism

  talking polarization blues

  07.28.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Lately, I’ve been delving more and more into the TPMCafe Book Club — I’m pleased to see that they’re veering more and more into both books on politics from across the ideological spectrum, but also throwing in the occasional novel (specifically, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland). I have, though, noticed some hostility from the comments section when [...]

• Film, criticism

  ‘the dark knight’ postscript

  07.26.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  I should also say that, having cited him below, Christopher Orr’s take on the film is pretty close to my own.

• Culture, Film, criticism

  moviegoing, critical responses, and responses to criticism

  07.26.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  So I went to see The Dark Knight yesterday after work. Did I like it? That I did, though at times it seemed like a strange fusion of The Wire and The Long Halloween — but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in my book. It Batman Begins factored in an homage to the character’s [...]

the scowl