Author: Mark

~ Mark

There’s all this talk about “bias” in public radio … the real bias in public radio is against joy.

Roman Mars, lamenting the dwindling experimentation and serendipity in public radio. His show 99% Invisible is a good antidote. (via)

Exit Through the Gift Shop

~ Mark

Exit Through the Gift Shop. I wish I felt more strongly on the love/hate spectrum for this one, either direction. Hoax or not, this was a little… boring? I’ll add the disclaimer that street art isn’t really my thing. It was fun to see the gleeful rush that the artists get from making their projects come to life in the dark of night. There’s some kind of manic drive to it all, legal/ethical/logistical difficulties be damned.

~ Mark

Social occasions can work a certain magic. You see your friends in costumes and onstage as it were, and suddenly they turn from ordinarily familiar to strangely familiar: They achieve sudden glory.

Eva Brann. (via christmasgorilla)

Ranking Baseball’s Best Ballparks – NYTimes.com

~ Mark

The winner by a country mile is Pittsburgh’s PNC Park. More than 80 percent of reviewers gave it the top, 5-star rating, and its average score was 4.77 points. It is followed by Boston’s Fenway Park (4.59 stars), San Francisco’s AT&T Park (4.57), Minneapolis’ Target Field (4.53), and Baltimore’s Camden Yards (4.47).

I have a suspicion based on zero personal experience that Pittsburgh is one of America’s secretly great cities.

Ranking Baseball’s Best Ballparks – NYTimes.com

Avatar

~ Mark

Avatar. I’m of two minds on this one. Glad to cross it off the list, but you could live happily without seeing it. It’s about as good as you can do a dumb movie. Strange pacing. Heavy-handed political parallels. So much swooping sweeping camera movement. Give James Cameron credit for, gradually, over the course of the movie, making me actually want to finish it, and for not being afraid to kill off side characters. Maybe I’ll watch Titanic this year, too.

~ Mark

It’s my theory that rock and roll happens between fans and stars, rather than between listeners and musicians—that you have to be a screaming teenager, at least in your heart, to know what’s going on.

Ellen Willis, quoted in The New Inquiry – Heroine: Ellen Willis on Rock Music. On a similar note, Daniel Mendelsohn says:

Strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even… Critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken.

See also both Little Steven and Elijah Wald on music and dancing.

~ Mark

Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start.

Clive James.

‘The Hangover’ and the Age of the Jokeless Comedy – NYTimes.com

~ Mark

In Apatow, the enemy is adulthood, which ruins life; in Phillips, the enemy is women, who ruin men.

What these auteurs truly have in common, though, is that they have systematically boiled away many of the pleasures previously associated with comedy — first among these, jokes themselves — and replaced them with a different kind of lure: the appeal of spending two hours hanging out with a loose and jocular gang of goofy bros.

‘The Hangover’ and the Age of the Jokeless Comedy – NYTimes.com