Something Old, Nothing New

The conductor Rene Jacobs keeps on providing the best evidence that classical recording isn't dead. Already this year he's given us...

GEORGE LUCAS: These are my movies. I made them, and I have the right to do whatever I want with them. STAN: You're wrong, Mr. Lucas. Th...

On the occasion of the DVD release of the first season of Columbo , LA Weekly has a good analysis of the show. Peter Falk also has a recen...

I don't have much to blog about right now (though you'd think that the one advantage of a blog based entirely on random old stuff is...

Can Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress be considered a standard-repertoire piece by now? I don't think so, but it seems to...

In a previous post I had my say about the perniciousness of the "enviro-toon," the cartoon that tries to indoctrinate children ab...

Here's an expanded version of an exercise I once came up with on a musical theatre newsgroup: If you were given the names of ten musical...

Someone suggested to me that if I took the time to explain why I think Family Guy is a bad show, I might stand a chance of getting some ang...

Another thing about Vanity Fair that the new movie will have trouble preserving (no, I haven't seen it yet) is the narrator, that intru...

Interesting reviews of Billy Wilder's Kiss Me Stupid , which I watched again last night, can be found here and here . One thing I have...

While I struggle to balance my busy schedule (Monday: Nothing. Tuesday: Wash vest. Wednesday: Buy rutabaga at half-price), here are some l...

I haven't seen the new Vanity Fair movie yet, but I gather that, as in previous movie versions, the emphasis is on the story of Becky S...

One of the weirdest ideas about popular culture is that the pop culture of the '80s was predominantly right-wing. I grew up in the ...

A couple of things I left out of my long post about Looney Tunes director Bob McKimson : - After 1955, in addition to using animators who...

I was never really very deeply into "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fandom, mostly because of the romance stuff. Namely, my dislike of...

Of the directors of Warner Brothers cartoons, Robert McKimson is the forgotten man. Five of WB's directors are rated highly by most ca...

I picked up an excellent two-CD collection, The Essential Borodin , that collects fine performances of most of the major pieces of composer/...

I've been listening recently to the cast album of 70, Girls, 70 , a 1971 musical with songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb (the Cabaret an...