Vacation time
The enduring popularity of the Vacation series reflects not just the American appetite for travel, but also that old American virtue of gung-ho optimism
Arts Reviews
The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions
Sunday
Tuesday
Steve Austin and the age of the antihero
Stone Cold was foul-mouthed, sadistic and mean — and people loved him
The rising cost of remembering the Fab Four
A forthcoming George Harrison box set will sell for $1,000. Do we still love the Beatles enough to care?
Tuesday
Bo Burnham flirts with post-comedy
A lot of Inside is not even attempting to be funny
Monday
Friends: The Reunion turned out to be a pointless nostalgia-fest
The much-hyped comeback was a waste of time
Wednesday
Fifty years of ‘Imagine’
Perhaps the real secret to the song’s eternal popularity is that it taps into our modern obsession with feeling good about ourselves
Wednesday
The last American video store
Video killed the video store
Along came Bill Evans
No matter his personal woes, Evans almost always vouchsafed his listeners something not merely to dig but to cherish
Monday
Meet the Medici at the Met
Bad politics often make good art. That’s especially true when the art is tasked with making sense of political senselessness
Van Morrison is a sane man in a mad world
The Morrison cancel mob are dancing to the tune of the oligarchy that is trashing American democracy
Sunday
Take a trip with Hawkwind
Hawkwind played notes from underground, but they had a global influence
Tuesday
The end of the awards ceremony
Diversity drama at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association could prove fatal
Sunday
Even Elon Musk couldn’t make SNL funny
Everything seemed so dated
Tuesday
Elon Musk is too funny for Saturday Night Live
Still, I hope he kills it
Friday
A film festival fiasco in Narrowsburg, New York
Castellano and Castaldo descended upon Narrowsburg with a gust of wind, declaring that they would open an acting school, start a film festival and make it ‘the Sundance of the East’
Korean film has mastered the supernatural horror genre
For those of us who have followed Korean film for many years, the triumph of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden or the living-dead series Kingdom on Netflix came as no surprise
Cousteau was the boulevardier of the oceans
For Cousteau, scientific investigation, combined with the potential for good image-making, presented an unavoidable hazard to sea life
Tuesday
I’m turning Japanese
In the Eighties, Japan had prosperity, optimism, loads of bizarre porn and the solace of technological gadgetry
Monday
Messing up Beethoven’s Ninth
How do you rein in the overactive bits of Manfred Honeck’s imagination without driving him away?
Saturday
The Decemberists are the only band I adore who have a number of songs I actively despise
Part of what makes them special is the depth of their catalog
