“Miscellany” Category Archive

In the past week, two major movie writers on the Web, Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door and Raymond Young of Flickhead, hung up their stinky blogging shoes. Tim Lucas smells a trend and admits:

“I took a silent vow that I would discontinue this blog if he didn’t come out of his nine-hour surgery alive.”

So in the spirit of the week ... .

I try to keep Culture Snob focused on things culture-y and snobby, but ... .

If you can’t help yourself when it comes to other people’s babies, there’s lots more at Bad Dog Ginger’s Web site.

I am admittedly writing mostly from ignorance, but I can’t see any way that the strike by the Writers Guild of America will succeed unequivocally.

Yes, the writers that generate talk-show monologues, awards-show banter, and television and movie scripts will likely get some concessions from Hollywood, and will end up in a better place financially. But it will be virtually impossible for them to get their fair share — what they deserve.

Man Offered 11-Year-Old Tickets for Sex.

If the tickets were 11 years old, who would want them?

Things might look (nearly) the same here at Culture Snob, but extensive interior renovations have been made over the past two months. We pretty much gutted the place and started from scratch with the site’s innards. That work is now done.

If everything is working as it should, pay no attention. But if something doesn’t seem right, please report the problem.

If you care, a detailed list of changes can be found here.

Now I can get back to writing.

In the week that marks the fourth anniversary of Culture Snob, Adam Ross at DVD Panache has featured this site as his Friday Screen Test. It’s a great opportunity to indulge your insatiable curiosity about me.

Many thanks for the invitation and the virtual ink!

Edward Copeland at Edward Copeland on Film has tagged me, which must mean he doesn’t like me. Join the club, buddy!

People who have been tagged are required to reveal eight facts about themselves and to post and obey the following rules, which I’m copying from Edward’s site and to which I’ll add my own anal-retentive commentary, because somebody really needs to revise them for clarity and elegance.

Somebody entered the following search query and eventually found Culture Snob:

talent OR skill OR intelligence “rupert grint”

By the time the searcher found this page on Culture Snob, he or she was on the seventh page of search results. Apparently, it’s quite challenging to find talent or skill or intelligence in the kid who plays Ron Weasley.

So now we get to the inevitable hand-wringing about violence in the media, in this case trying to tie the Virginia Tech massacre to Oldboy:

“The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran [sic] Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004.”

The link is tenuous, and the assertion is utterly ridiculous. As Bob Cesca mocked:

“The lead character in Oldboy is Asian, which is weird and freaky because Oldboy is an Asian film and there are rarely any Asians in Asian movies. And ... the character appears to be grasping a hammer in the movie.”

But let’s say for the sake of argument that we found definitive proof that Cho Seung-Hui believed himself to be something akin to Oldboy’s protagonist. So what? All we’re doing by making that connection is adding obfuscation to what is already difficult to fathom: the unmotivated murders of more than 30 people.

Three days after the event, it seems increasingly clear that the shootings were the actions of a person with serious mental illness. Movies have nothing to do with it.

In the 1985 HBO mockumentary The History of White People in America, co-writer and host Martin Mull offered the world mayonnaise-loving WASPs — suburbanites who had lost any sense of their roots, to the point that one child’s understanding of his own heritage was limited to the streets on which he and his parents had lived.

White people, the show seemed to be saying, are beyond ethnicity and culture.

Mull doesn’t see a meaningful connection between that work and his paintings, which are presently touring the country in a retrospective. The only link, he said in a recent interview, is that they reflect his childhood in Ohio. “It comes from the same vein,” he said, “the same mother lode.”

Yet they share more than just a Midwestern upbringing. The History of White People in America is the light-comic flip side to Mull’s ambiguous but loaded paintings. Both represent a tug of war over the American dream, a recognition of both its allure and its pitfalls.

Pity poor Pluto.

I’ve begun to use the “tagging” capabilities of this site’s content-management system.

That should make Culture Snob easier to navigate by adding a tool that’s more intuitive. Until now, you were limited by the site’s search function and its tables of contents. Tags allow readers to find related material more easily, both within entries and in a site-encompassing “tag cloud.”

• Given the current sorry state of my Red Sox, I appreciate Jose Melendez’s uncovering the agenda for a recent closed-door team meeting:

  “IV. Report of subcommittee on relief pitching (Julian Tavarez) 10 minutes.
  a. Yield base hit.
  b. Walk number-nine hitter.
  c. Give up three-run homer.”

• Are you a national sportwriter with decidedly modest celebrity and a meager Wikipedia entry? Salon’s King Kaufman conducts an clinic on how to get the masses to make you “notable.”
• Look at these faces!
• Some seriously mixed reviews on World Trade Center. Jim Emerson asks if you can spot which blurbs are meant as praise, and which are criticisms.
• A smart appreciation of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
• The youth are our future. And by the time they’re old enought to drink, nearly 60 percent of them would rather watch a movie at home than in the movie theater.

Proving myself to always be on the leading edge of late-adopters, Culture Snob has created a podcast for your listening ... amusement? For the uninitiated, “Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio programs or music videos, over the Internet for playback on mobile devices and personal computers,” according to Wikipedia. We shan’t be producing videos, but you’ll have plenty of opportunities to listen to my sonorous, authoritative voice. (That last bit about my voice? A joke at my own expense.) Culture Snob’s audio content is still developing, but right now it comes in three forms: (1) commentary tracks, (2) interviews, and (3) audio versions of essays.

David Plotz of Slate is undertaking a fascinating project with a terrible name: “Blogging the Bible.” It starts here and is a mix of snarky commentary and a close reading rooted in genuine curiosity. Both can be found in this passage:

“When He rejects the vegan special, God chastises Cain with this advice. ‘Sin couches at the door; Its urge is toward you, Yet you can be its master.’ This is just about the best advice you can give anyone. It is conservative idealism, compressed into a sentence: We must decide for ourselves to do right. Not that Cain pays attention: He kills his brother in the very next verse.”

Nominated for its brevity, its simplicity, its expressiveness, and its sonic shape:

“They’d boo free pie.”

Google confirms the phrase as original.

Plus: A reader educates Culture Snob about the history of free pie given to tough audiences!

After nearly 35 years, I have given my first thought to the perfume industry. Slate evaluates some surprisingly good celebrity fragrances, and discusses how they’ve revitalized the industry. Plus, you get to snicker at the extreme manliness of Cumming.

Ladies and gentlemen, your new Bill of Rights. About damn time somebody fixed it.

I’m about 15 years late to this party, but I’ve always planned to write a lengthy piece on my love for Oliver Stone’s JFK. My point would simply be that whatever its failings as a credible history (or even a viable alternative history), JFK excels as propaganda, and should be studied for that reason. In a 1993 essay in The Atlantic, Edward Jay Epstein does a good job explaining Stone’s methods:

“The fictional O’Keefe’s story is supported by Ferrie’s fictional confession, which is then given weight by Ferrie’s fictional murder by the fictional bald-headed Cuban introduced in O’Keefe’s story. Since ... Oliver Stone’s audience is not apprised of the substitutions of fiction for fact, this cross-corroboration makes plausible ... the New Orleans plot.”

The irony is that the essay is intended as a tearing apart of Stone and his film. (Beware that the Internet version of Epstein’s article is rife with typos, making infrequent sentences incomprehensible.)

The wife and I commissioned a painting of our dog. We asked not for a portrait, but for a painting that included Bad Dog Ginger. This is what we got.