Category Archives: Popular Culture

General, Media Criticism, Popular Culture

Another Great Newsman Gone

2 Comments

Condolences to friends, family and colleagues of Tony Snow. I wonder if major television news people die in threes as well? Unlike Russert, this wasn’t as unexpected–he had been fighting the cancer for a long time, and his mother died of it. But I hadn’t been aware that he was near the end.

[Update in the evening]

Mark Steyn has a short tribute (not to imply that many others don’t, and I suspect that he’ll have a longer one in due time). This is a very interesting point politically:

He had a rare temperament in today’s politics, and the Administration might have been spared the vicissitudes of these last five years had he become press secretary earlier.

Yes, of the many failings of George W. Bush, one of them is loyalty to previous staff. Scott McClellan was completely out of his element as WH spokesman, yet he was allowed to blunder through during many of the worst years of the administration. Things might have gone much differently had Tony Snow been brought in earlier. He would have challenged much of the nonsense that the press was putting forward much earlier, without looking like a deer in the headlights. It just shows how important perception can be.

[Update a while later]

Here’s an encomium from Rick Moran.

It’s very hard to come up with anything negative about Tony Snow, though I’m sure that one or two of my regular commenters will make the attempt in the service of their vile political agendas. I hope that I’m wrong.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Lileks On Keillor

5 Comments

James takes on, once again, his fellow Minnesota scribe:

Mr. Keillor feels he has done okay in the last eight years but has a hot collar and ground-up teeth thinking about what the Current Occupant has done to the country the little girl will inherit. He’s mad about spending – I’m with him there, although a bit perplexed to find Keillor coming down on the side of spending less – and he doesn’t approve of the war. It ruined his Rockwell moment.

Being unable to watch a kid play baseball because you are mad at George Bush does not necessarily mean you are a better person or a person more attuned to truth and the future.It might mean, at best, you are a person who writes run-on sentences stringing together predictable assertions; at worst, it might mean you’re anhedonic, and looking for scapegoats. I look at my daughter and consider her future, and I see possibility and peril as well. But that’s up to us, and while I’m sure Mr. Keillor anticipates the day where he is legally required to pay the taxes he heretofore feels he is morally required to pay, we can do fine without him. We’ve done fine without his money so far, and I think we can keep that up. Unless he’s been paying in at the pre-tax-cut level, of course. In which case: hats off! A principled man is rare in any era.

You know, I actually greatly enjoy Keillor’s books, but when you let him loose on an editorial page, he seems to go completely nuts. Bush derangement is a very real thing.

Popular Culture

Pitchers’ Duel

3 Comments

Wow.

I just happened to glance at the Tigers-Seahawks game, and they’re tied 1-1, in the fourteenth inning. They need to win to keep pace with Chicago and the Twins.

[Sunday night update]

OK, they pulled it out not long after, 2-1. Though as a commenter notes, it”s a little depressing that they had to fight so hard against the Seahawks.

[Update on Monday]

OK, OK, I get it.

I’m obviously more of a Tigers fan than a baseball fan, and I don’t follow Seattle sports at all. Also obviously, I meant Mariners.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

More WALL-E Thoughts

9 Comments

Lileks discusses the grief that he’s gotten over the fact that he enjoyed the movie:

Shannen Coffin at the Corner notes that you never know how much hate mail you’ll get until you take on a Pixar film. I’d add that the opposite is oddly true as well: I got a lot of very negative email about the review, some of which had to do with “shilling” (as one writer put it) for Disney, but most of which had to do with buying an eco-scary / anti-capitalist agenda because the characters were cute. Apparently I can write for years and demonstrate skepticism towards catastrophic doom-mongering, and it counts for nil. Ah well. Look, I think “JFK” is a pretty good piece of filmmaking. Its ideas are rubbish and its effect pernicious, but I still think it’s a compelling work. Doesn’t mean I believe a single frame.

Sometimes you separate the ideas from the movie, sometimes you can’t, sometimes you shouldn’t, and sometimes you don’t want to because you approve of the ideas. Asking me to reject Wall-E because its unrealistic premise has contemporary overtones is like asking me to swear off Star Trek because Roddenberry wanted a post-religious collectivist one-world government that eschewed money and property.

He also chides Andrew Sullivan for stereotyping:

Apparently Andrew Sullivan took note of the review, and while I appreciate the patronage, this rankles a bit:

“Well Lileks loved it. Not all conservatives are stupid ideologues.”

And not all liberals are stupid anti-consumerists who spaz out when someone praises the Works of Walt! Who’d have thunk it. Really, if one wants to cling, bitterly, to the notion that a believe in lower taxes and strong foreign policy and greater individual freedom re: speech and property automatically translates to a crimpled, reductive, censorious view of pop culture, go right ahead.

Last night, I watched the end of Ratatouille, and afterward was a history of Pixar. Interesting stuff. It was a great example of the powerful synergy you can get when you successfully meld C. P. Snow’s two cultures and combine traditional animators with computer geeks.

As good as they’re getting at this stuff, though, I don’t think that it’s the death of 2-D animation. I suspect that as the 3-D stuff continues to asymptotically approach verisimilitude, there will be rebellious young turks who want to draw cartoons, and so the cycle will begin anew.

In any event, the foofaraw makes me want to see the movie in the theater, something I haven’t done with a Pixar movie since Toy Story (though I wanted to with Ratatouille).

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Technology and Society

Is Big Government A Mac?

2 Comments

Or a PC?

[Update in the afternoon]

Why we should want big government to be a PC:

You know I love the products, but Apple is a fascist company. I should know — I worked there. Even got personally cussed out by Steve Jobs (may his name be praised forever).

Apple products are based on centralized command-and-control. Apple makes the hardware, software, and — increasingly — many key applications (“everything inside the state, nothing outside the state”). The Apple faithful believe that the computing world dominated by Microsoft is bad (if not outright evil) and must be redeemed. If only everyone changed to their way of computing, we would reach computing nirvana. And society would be changed for the better, too. If only.

The analogy may be getting a little strained.