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November 29, 2006  Click here for the new, larger version of the "Adames is Mayor" signs that have popped up all over New York. It's a fun story; Jose Adames is a public-access fixture (scroll down this page for a bio) who has unsuccessfully run for almost every office in New York. In his private world, he was locked last year in a tight battle with Bloomberg for the GOP mayoral nomination. Now that the election is long over, he has ramped up accusations that Bloomberg had phony primary petitions and used harassment and extortion to prevent people from realizing that Adames should be the true nominee. Adames is also claiming that various federal courts are about to decide who the real mayor is. November 15, 2006
We already know that Mel Gibson doesn't really care what Abraham Foxman thinks of him. Now it seems as if he's trying to get Strunk and White on his case too. The tagline to Apocalypto, as seen on a huge billboard in Bushwick, is: "No one can outrun their destiny." The last time I checked, this was not a grammatical sentence of English.
November 11, 2006
"If you come anywhere near Macy, or Joe, or anyone I've ever had coffee with, you're dead..." The sadly departed CBS show Smith, starring Ray Liotta and Virginia Madsen, was saddled with a generic name, bad lead-in, and a plot that actually had to be followed by the audience, so it lost viewers and was canceled after three episodes. All is not lost, however, because CBS has just put the next four episodes of the show on its free Innertube streaming video service, and has posted detailed synopses on CBS.com of the remaining unshot episodes to reveal how the story arcs would have concluded. The new episodes are great, and make a strong case that the show would have been a standout had it been given some breathing room. Meanwhile, the other new show of the season that I enjoyed, Shark, with James Woods, enjoys high ratings and a strong lead-in, but has quickly lost its charm and become a fairly listless police/law procedural brought to life only by Woods' occasional outbursts.
November 09, 2006  In yet another reminder that the "bronze age" of film scoring -- the 70s, 80s, and early 90s -- is firmly in the past, Conan and Red October composer Basil Poledouris died yesterday at age 61. November 08, 2006  So many amazing thoughts about last night. Santorum is gone. Curt Weldon is gone. But even more amazing, thanks to his Missouri senate ad, Marty McFly may very well have saved America one last time, from an alternate 2006 in which we don't take the Senate. And I'm in love with Jim Webb ... The Democrats finally figured out how to do something right! Unlike Al Gore, Jim Webb waltzes on stage and declares victory before FoxNews can take it away from him. Oh, and from the loonies on the right, a blog post about how Rick Santorum is now available for a Supreme Court seat! And did anyone else catch Ken Mehlman on CNN last night, after the Md. Senate race had been called for Cardin, saying that Steele was going to pull off a "historic upset"? Um, maybe not... Also, the Socialists in the European Parliament are not mincing any words... November 01, 2006
It's a sad state of affairs as all Tower Records stores are closing. The situation on the ground at New York's two main Tower locations -- the East Village and Lincoln Center -- has been positively apocalyptic, as the liquidation sale has brought all sorts of, for instance, Nickelback fans out of the woodwork to pick up their favorite band's back catalog. The truly tragic part of all this is that Tower has, probably to its great detriment, maintained the absolute best inventory of any large music chain. I can't even begin to count the wacky Canadian early 80s dance music, the bizarre European singles, and the long out-of-print-but-lacking-demand soundtracks that have popped up in Tower Records stores I have visited. Furthermore, Tower has the best inventory of SACD and DVD-Audio titles of any brick-and-mortar, including ones that are now very hard to find. (At last visit, the Lincoln Center Tower still had a copy of Foreigner's 4 on DVD-Audio, which is a disc that everyone should have.) So here's to Tower Records, whose demise is another nail in the coffin of music retail.
In other news, my friend John and I have created The Dunsel Report, which we think is really funny but most people will probably not get. Oh, and I had planned a long post about the "blaster beam," a somewhat bizarre electronic music instrument that former child actor Craig Huxley created in the 70s. However, I will let this amazing post about the blaster beam speak for itself. |