Category Archives: Kultcha

According to today's incomparable Daily Howler, Bob Somerby will be on the radio soon. It sounds like can't-miss radio:

THE O'FRANKEN ADVENTURE: Our entire staff guest-stars today on Air America's inspiring show, The O'Franken Factor. Our segment starts at 12:30 Eastern. With Al's enthusiastic permission, we plan to discuss Wittgenstein's “private language argument,” although our presentation is fairly tight and may not take the entire segment. Punch line: “If they told us that when we were sophomores, we wouldn't have had to take Descartes or Kant!” Of course, if you try to do this on conservative radio, they give you this look like you're nuts.

Excitement builds in the radio world. We certainly hope you'll be listening.

I've listened to Air America a few time in the evening and found it to be just plain awful. To be fair I haven't heard either of what I expect would be the best shows — Al Franken's show and Florida's own Randi Rhodes. But what I have heard is pretty pathetic.

In contrast…no, by any standard, the clips of the Daily Show the Comedy Network puts online are absolutely fantastic.

Eric Alterman complains that his book got ignored by major media because it made them uncomfortable:

The book got almost no attention in the media; the only significant review was the one published in The Washington Post, who gave it to Reagan/Bush/Fox News operative, James Pinkerton. Still, with next to no media attention, the book entered the Times extended best-seller list and stayed there four weeks. I’ve never before published a book that was so thoroughly ignored in the media, nor one that started out as a best-seller.

I haven't read it. I imagine that the book review editors most likely would say that didn't review it because they thought it wasn't that great, or was like a lot of other anti-Bush books being published these days.

Probably just about every author thinks that his book deserved more and better reviews, so one should treat all such complaints with healthy scepticism. And it's certainly the case that not every best-seller gets reviewed. Diet books, sleazy potboilers, and many genre fiction such as scifi/fantasy books sell well but don't get much attention from newspaper reviewers.

But when was the last time a non-fiction political book was a best seller and didn't get reviewed in major newspapers? Maybe the last time such a book accused those papers of mis- (if not mal-) feasance?

Maybe it's my not having a TV (that's a subject for a whole separate series of posts), or maybe it's living and teaching in South Florida (where sunbathers are topless and students are highly variable in their clothingness), but I have to wonder whether the almost always unnamed supposedly outraged critics who call this pornographic or even “indecent” exist in any substantial numbers. So far I've seen one, just one, name beside FCC Chairman Powell's—that of Jan LaRue, chief counsel for a group called Concerned Women for America, whom AFP quoted as calling it a “pornographic show”.

Pornographic? One breast for a few seconds? Compared to who sits in corporate stadium boxes and why? Or who paid for the stadium and how? Or, for that matter, compared to the various teams' cheerleaders?

Yes, Miami is different, and there are no doubt colder places around where people dress up more, and where undress is more of an issue. But even there, I gather that the sales of skin mags and skin vids are high. I'd sort of gotten the sense that the country was getting over its neo-Puritanism.

So even if these hordes of shocked football fans are more than a creature of the newswriters' imagination, I have to wonder to what extent they are representative of this great nation, or just rather unusually prissy.

If asked, I'd say that the pornography on the air is the violence and cruelty that forms staples of many TV shows. The mean-spirited humor, the portrayal of so many characters as morons, the willingness to serve up news shows that swallow political lies whole or, worse, produce new ones. I could go on and on and on, but you shouldn't take my word for it, I don't have a TV set. Instead, visit Billmon's nicely redesigned Whiskey Bar, and see what he has to say.

Who knew football fans were such wimps?

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What he said: Lenz Blog.

We’ve been goofing off. Wednesday we head back to the US—a long day flight after we change planes in London.

Highly recommended book(s): Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark, the third in a series beginning with Chasm City and Revelation Space. Almost as good as Ian M. Banks’s best, and far better than his latest.

We wanted to see the Return of the King, but it was sold out so we took what was available and saw Love Actually, which turns out to be a surprisingly fun film. It’s silly, frothy, full of simplistic plots that collapse if you think about most of them for five seconds, but it is wonderfully acted by an all-star cast, and is much more fun than I would ever have expected. Even the miscast Hugh Grant isn’t as annoying as you might fear, and Alan Rickman is superb. (Other cast members include: Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, Martin Freeman, Martine McCutcheon, and a very funny dual cameo by Rowan Atkinson).

Very highly recommended if you are ever in the area: The Original Third Eye, a tiny Nepalese restaurant in Didsbury. Not worth a large detour perhaps, but great to have only ten minutes walk away.

The film does not shine
It's a ripoff, they say
Which we knew in advance
From the adverts they play

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