I’m beginning to think that my beard and I are going to have to part ways — not just for now, but for good. I have, in recent years, wanted to grow a big-ass, menacing beard. (This has less to do with any hipster tendencies on my part than with …
First of all, how about that title, eh? The movie could be a heap of shit and it would still win points for the title, which sounds like some lost French new wave picture. Éclat de Silence, avec Alain Delon. But no, it’s an American film noir, albeit a pretty …
After a half-century of perceived American cultural hegemony, Europeans feel the need to get back at us in any way that they can. You really can’t blame them; after endless decades of ruling the world, here we come with our fat loudmouthed tourists and our Big Macs, ruining everything, and …
Advertising is pretty evil, and it gets even more evil the more abstract and detached from its subject it gets. But it reaches a certain point of abstraction where it transcends its sinister purposes and can go one of two ways: it can become art, or it can be so …
So Andy Gray, the voice of Sky Sports for two decades and one of the most familiar announcers in soccer, has been sacked. He takes with him his hench-creature Richard Keys, along with any pretense that soccer announcers are any less cretinous than the voices of American sporting events. Gray …
I’ve always taken a special displeasure in the ‘things were better before’ approach to culture. While it’s undeniable that taste is taste, it strikes me as a particularly lazy way to come at the world around you to simply let your tastes calcify without protest. Sure, it’s hard to keep …
MANHATTAN. “Okay this one is easy. It’s what you call a basic, a basic cocktail. You take a whiskey, a rye whiskey, and vermouth, and a cherry. And there you ugh! Sorry, there you go! It’s easy! It was named after the Manhattan cocktail. I mean, the Manhattan Hotel. In …
I have appeared on a brand new episode of everyone’s favorite drunken podcast, Wasted Words, and shit gets epic! RJ White, Olivia Todd, Mike Riggs, and Shek Baker are forced to listen to me voice my obnoxious irony about celebrity culture. Also, there is long-vanished candy, soda pop, crazy people …
Crime is perennially at the top of polls regarding what voters worry about the most. With the upsurge in terrorism, the advent of cyber-crime, and organized crime taking on a new international flavor, people are not only concerned about crime, but they seem to have new crimes to worry about …
Everybody likes being right, but sometimes being right is a lot more like a severe depressant than an ego boost. Such is the case with today’s look at the world’s widest web: I have always maintained that, even in comparison with such internet sewers as IMDB and YouTube, the comments …
By this point — 21 years into their career, and six into their remarkably rewarding and productive stint with Southern Lord — you know pretty much what to expect from Earth. Droning, syrupy riffs delivered in a heavy-minimalist style, echoing guitars over a humming bottom, a crushing low end over …
Judging a movie by its potential is probably skirting the edge of fairness, but the creepy 1947 carnival-noir Nightmare Alley tempts pretty strongly in that direction. The feeling it finally leaves you with is an unsatisfying one, both in the way it frequently opens up possibilities it doesn’t quite live …
I drink a lot of soda, because I am a doomed consumerist pawn. Occasionally I will review them in this space. And what better place to start than with Coca-Cola, the Platonic ideal of non-alcoholic beverages? The descendant of Georgia druggist John Stith Pemberton’s formulation for French Wine Coca is …
Along with all the other exciting and annoying content to hit this site in 2011, I am getting ready to kick off a special feature called The Sandwich Century. Over the course of the year, I will prepare, consume, and document a hundred different sandwiches, and you will follow it …
The other day, which by my reckoning could have been anywhere between last Thursday and Thanksgiving of 2004, I was talking with a good friend about the Daily Beast’s annual ranking of the smartest cities in America. Although my stomping grounds of San Antonio ranked 54th out of 55, that …
