Kelly Jane Torrance on Philip K. Dick: A quarter-century after his death, he is finally considered not just a serious American writer but one of the century’s greatest. At least, that’s one conclusion to be drawn from Dick’s inclusion in the Library of America: the first science-fiction writer to be so canonized in what is […]

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How in the name of all that’s good in holy did Gordon Jenkins win a Grammy for best instrumental arrangement on the September of My Years version of “It Was A Very Good Year“? Is there any more dramatic example of an excellent song, beautifully sung, and utterly ruined by cheeseball, overdone, easy-listening strings? I […]

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New York Post film critic Kyle Smith on Ratatouille. Now, where have I heard that before?

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Brock at BattlePanda has a chuckle at my loony suggestion that Ratatouille reflects the influence of the ideas of Ayn Rand. Because you know how we nutty libertarians are, reading our wacky notions into everything. To see some kind of Randian influence on creator Brad Bird, you’d have to be a foaming-at-the-mouth libertarian moonbat like… […]

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I seldom read individual issues of comic books any more, and when I do read comics, they usually aren’t the same mainstream spandex-and-superpowers titles that enthralled me as an adolescent. But if the recent one-shot X-Men: Endangered Species is representative, the genre is evolving in promising new directions. While it’s actually manga that are leading […]

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For some reason, I had remembered the Bangles cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter” as being much better than it is. I now feel as though someone ought to do a cover as good as I’d imagined it being. In related news, I finally paid enough attention to Wire’s lyrics to realize that R.E.M.’s “Strange” […]

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In the comments to the post “Rock Heresy,” Andrew writes: So, is there an album that is beyond reproach? It would have to be something that doesn’t aim too high, wouldn’t it? I don’t know that I’ve got an answer to that one, but it did get me thinking about the category of the “overrated” […]

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We’ve got another month before Spoon’s new album hits stores, but you can stream tracks at the Merge Records jukebox now.

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Jim Henley links to an interesting roundup in The Guardian of various rock musicians picking the classic or critically-acclaimed album they think is overrated. A few are cop outs—is it really all that ballsy to slag Neon Bible?—and you probably will disagree with a fair number, but they’re mostly interesting. Though I’ll exempt Franz Ferdinand […]

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Andrew Sullivan links this clip from Britain’s equivalent of American Idol (with Simon Cowell and everything!) of a cell phone salesman belting out (bits of) “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot. On the one hand, I’m delighted to see someone can get a standing ovation singing opera on a show like this, and never in a million […]

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