Category Archives: Popular Culture

Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Lorne Michaels

30 Comments

…on Sarah Palin:

I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she’s powerful. Her politics aren’t my politics. But you can see that she’s a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she’s had a huge impact. People connect to her.

There’s also this, on how monolingual so-called liberals are:

…something dawned on me today, and Palin crystallized it. You see, I “get” Palin. And I “get” why my liberal friends don’t “get” Palin. But my liberal friends just don’t “get” why I “get” Palin — and they never will.

…John Podhoretz…once said, “All conservatives are bilingual — we have to be. We speak both liberal and conservative. But liberals are monolingual — they don’t have to be anything else. They speak liberal, and are completely ignorant of the conservative tongue.”

I’m not a conservative, but I’m bilingual as well. But I sure get a lot of monolingual commenters at this blog.

Popular Culture

RIP, Edie

2 Comments

Edie Adams has died. Those too young to remember her should check out DVDs of Ernie Kovacs’ show. Or go rent It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

I met her as a child growing up in Flint. She (and, I think, Kovacs) performed in one of the A.C. Spark Plug concerts that my father produced in the sixties, and we always got to meet the stars back stage at the IMA auditorium afterward, and often went to Luigi’s for pizza (still the best pizza in the universe, IMHO). The place has autographed pictures of the stars that dined there on the wall. I think hers is still there.

Popular Culture

Well, At Least It Can’t Get Any Worse

1 Comment

The Wolverines just lost to Toledo, at home. It’s going to be an ugly season. Clearly the Wisconsin game was a fluke. And while it was expected to be a rebuilding year, I don’t think that anyone expected it to be this bad. Probably alumni are already calling for Rodriguez’ head.

[Update a little while later]

Unsurprisingly, it was a pretty ugly game for Michigan. And the first time they’d ever been defeated by a MAC team.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Secession

11 Comments

Should American writers secede from the Nobel Prize for literature?

There was a brief moment, after World War II, when the Nobel Committee allowed that America might produce more sophisticated writers. No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. But in the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure. To judge by the Nobel roster, you would think that the last three decades have been a time of American cultural drought rather than the era when American culture and language conquered the globe.

But that, of course, is exactly the problem for the Swedes. As long as America could still be regarded as Europe’s backwater–as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel–it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist. When Engdahl declares, “You can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it’s the pictures that got smaller.

Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl’s claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn’t think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.

Other than that I think Hemingway is vastly overrated, and ample fodder for parody, I agree. The Peace prizes have been a joke since Arafat and Rigoberto Menchu (not to mention Jimmy Carter), and I think that the literature prizes have gone the same way, decades ago.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Off To The Movies

9 Comments

I very rarely see a movie in a theater. I’d say it averages once or twice a year (though we did see Dark Knight a couple months ago–the last one before that was The Astronaut Farmer). But tonight Patricia and I are going out to see American Carol to boost its opening weekend ratings (plus, it looks like it should be pretty funny, and I think we can all use a good laugh right now, given current events). At this point, I’m all about promoting and encouraging alternate media/viewpoints, particularly from Hollywood. I may or may not review it tomorrow.

[Monday morning update]

Meh.

It was entertaining, and a good story, but not roll-in-the-aisles funny, at least for us. Of course, I’ve never been that big a Zucker/slapstick fan (e.g., I’ve never even seen any of the Naked Gun series). It’s not the sort of flick that I would normally want to see in a theater, but I was happy to help boost the first weekend ratings. Of course, unlike the previous ones, there are some emotionally affecting moments in this one (quickly broken up, of course, by more crude slapstick).

So if you want to support this sort of politically incorrect movie (always a noble goal, in my opinion), spend a couple hours and spend the ten bucks. You’ll have a good time, but don’t expect too much.

[Note: this post has been bumped to the top, new stuff below]