I've been tough on Nancy Franklin, so to be fair here's a lead that made me chortle: "America is having a torrid love affair with “Desperate Housewives,” and I feel so left out..." [Greg's archives RULE.] GOOFY GOOBERS -- NOT: "...It is not the first time that children's TV favorites have come … [Read more...]

While waiting in the car yesterday, we came across "Surfin' Bird" by the Trashmen (actually a mashup of two songs by the Rivingtons. Adam (4) insisted on listening to it maybe 100 times in a row, laughing until he cried. The joy that bubbled out of him was delirious. None of the repetitions got … [Read more...]

Bow-tied neocon scuzzball Tucker Carlson, the guy Jon Stewart confronted on the sinking ship Crossfire? Turns out to be a major source for Sister Helen Prejean's death penalty piece (from NY Review of Books): ...In his autobiography, Bush claimed that the pending execution of Karla Faye Tucker … [Read more...]

Vexing how persistent these misperceptions are, long after the battle was waged, won, and consumerized. Talking about the pre-Beatle years in the early 1960s, Bruce Bawer writes: "Those years were America’s liberal moment, and a pivotal point in American history." But his lengthy article in the … [Read more...]

Would you take a $3.99 chance on this pay-per-view? "Evie, a wallflower in a dead-end job, is obsessed with a struggling musician. Through a fanatic event, Evie comes into focus and Casey capitalizes on the attention." -- listing for the film A Slipping-Down Life, starring Lili Taylor and Guy Pearce … [Read more...]

from WBUR's Arts page: The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, by David Thomson (Knopf) The title of David Thomson's new history of film employs a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE LAST TYCOON: "You can take Hollywood for granted..., or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what … [Read more...]

From WBUR's Here and Now homepage: It was quite a year for pop culture and the pop culture wars. Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction launched a year long values debate that culminated in the presidential election. Gay marriage was in the headlines, but abysmal marriages were at the core of the … [Read more...]

Stephanie Zacharek, a critic I admire, went ballistic on David Thomson's new book in the NYTimes Book Review. It struck me as unnecessarily mean-spirited: Thomson's dismissiveness of silents makes him seem like a fogy who's trying to be jazzy -- as if he were overly concerned to reassure us he's … [Read more...]

JK writes in with this link: the Beastles (which should have been called the "Beastlies") but it's worth a click. So, is it the birth of a new "fab sampling" genre? Is it "better" than Danger Mouse? JK thinks so. And I forgot: CNN's Greatest Hits Guide Listology Columnists Technorati Search … [Read more...]

For those titles not linked to the iTunes store, contact support to let them know you'd buy it if they carried it. 1. Rocket From The Tombs ROCKET REDUX (Smog Veil) 2. Danger Mouse GREY ALBUM (download) 3. Sam Phillips A BOOT AND A SHOE (Nonesuch) 5. Los Lobos THE RIDE (Hollywood) 7. Alison Kraus … [Read more...]

Random samplings from Ian Van Tuyl's ticklingly insightful POPSTROLOGY: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF READING THE POP STARS (Bloomsbury USA): MARY WELLS You can rage against the machine, or you can walk away before your arms get caught in the gears. ...No matter how much you serve the institution, and no … [Read more...]

Milo Miles in WBUR's Arts pages: 1) Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History" by Devin McKinney (Harvard University Press). This looks to be the standard-setting meditation on the Beatles by a devoted, visionary fan too young to have known Beatlemania first-hand (McKinney was born in 1966). … [Read more...]

The sign of "live"-ness in a live recording doesn't come from the performers but from the audience—the sound of their applause. Mission of Burma's 1985 live album, The Horrible Truth About Burma, in its original configuration, ends with an apocalyptic cover of Pere Ubu's "Heart of Darkness," … [Read more...]

These great faces in the movie dark, these moons of becoming, are they one of the few benevolent invasions of the twentieth century, meant to offset all the other images of slaughter, torture, and humiliation? Or is their intense allure just another danger, cunningly disguised? Or is it that the … [Read more...]

I don't know how to say this without sounding like an old geezer, but James Taylor just has no right to sing "A Change Is Gonna Come," it swallows him up, and it's too big a song for most of his audience. It was certainly too big a song for the West Wing episode it tried to cap: were we supposed to … [Read more...]