The break starts with another excellent animated MTV promo. (Whoever was in charge of these must have been having a blast.) This one stars marionettes in a drawing room that appears to be inspired by Marie Antoinette. The sexiest marionette, with a drink in hand and red pants so tight they look like they were […]
posted 24 June 2008 in 1988. 4 comments
The first installment in an irregular series of posts, highlighting some of the more improbable lyrics I run across. Writing about “Always on My Mind” got me listening to my old Pet Shop Boys albums. Generally, they hold up really well, but Introspective does have a few clunkers. Neil Tennant mispronounces “Debussy.” He fails to […]
posted 23 June 2008 in Tasty Bits. 3 comments
I relaunched this website about two months ago and haven’t done much to promote it, other than emailing a bunch of friends to let them know I had found a new way to waste time. But I hugely appreciate everyone who’s linked to it, and this seems like a good moment to be reciprocal: My […]
posted 23 June 2008 in Links. no comments yet
A few years ago, I brought my camera along to a (long, dull) video shoot for Los Lonely Boys, in a small town about an hour north of Austin, Texas. This was my favorite picture of the day. (More flipwalks next week.)
posted 20 June 2008 in Photos. no comments yet
There are two essential out-of-print music books that I own only in treasured Xerox copies. One is Jon Savage’s The Kinks: The Official Biography. The other is Chris Heath’s Pet Shop Boys, Annually. I had never thought until today about the similarities between Ray Davies and Neil Tennant–British songwriters with a particular gift for lonely […]
posted 19 June 2008 in 1988. 5 comments
I’ve got another piece up at the Barnes and Noble Review: this one‘s a short review of The Complete Peanuts: 1967 to 1968. Two additional buying recommendations in a similar vein: 1. Schulz and Peanuts, the stellar biography from last year by David Michaelis. 2. Any previous volume of The Complete Peanuts (or all of […]
posted 18 June 2008 in Outside, Reviews. no comments yet
The video opens with Cher and some boytoy looking at themselves in the same mirror. He’s wearing a white scoop-neck t-shirt, cut low in both the back and the front, and has a big puffy poodle haircut. Cher looks exactly like she did in 1978, or in 1998. The boytoy is fussing with his hair. […]
About ten years ago, Wired had a regular feature where they did “interviews” with dead people. They kicked it off with a cover story on Marshall McLuhan; it turned out that skillful excerpts from the works of sufficiently interesting thinkers of the past could create the illusion of a modern conversation. I stumbled on a […]
posted 16 June 2008 in Archives, Articles, Unpublished. no comments yet
Returning once again to February 2005: The photo and report for my twenty-seventh flipwalk can be found here. David Adam Edelstein was generous enough (and obsessive enough) to make a map of my first twenty-five flipwalks. Check it out and see all the places I ended up, and how they cluster. And then go visit […]
posted 13 June 2008 in Photos. no comments yet
Every now and then I learn a nugget of information that really lights up the gossip columns and the blogosphere. I think the last time might have been when Ashton Kutcher told me about the Bush twins’ visit to his house (“I go upstairs to T.J.’s room and I can smell the green wafting out […]
posted 12 June 2008 in Outside. no comments yet
