Today’s question: how good can a show about wrestling be if the wresting in the show isn’t very good? The answer, at least if the show under discussion is Netflix’s new series GLOW, is…well, pretty good, actually! Maybe that’s because of the show’s many other strengths, or maybe it’s because of …
In these exciting times when the only thing Americans love more than billion-dollar superhero movie franchises is petty intra-party political sniping, I thought it might be time to return to a favorite obsession of mind: the ideological leanings of various comic book characters. This has been explored in-universe a bit …
Ladies and gentlemen, my constituents, citizens of my lovely home town of Fleenerville, voters, and Platinum V.I.P. Brunch Club Super-Tee level donors; my beloved wife Plovis, and my two wonderful sons Coho and Spelt, who flew in to support me tonight right after their Offal Studies final at Klumner State …
It is giving no secrets away to say that, growing up, I was a huge nerd. I am, let us be honest, still a huge nerd, which is why you are reading these words on the pages of a decade-old blog instead of the pages of Entertainment Weekly. But in some fairly important …
Another week, another flame-out between liberals and the left over which we should ‘choose’ in the alleged battle between class and identity. Believe me, folks, I don’t like writing these pieces any more than you like reading them, but until we can bury this utterly false dichotomy once and for …
It’s been a busy week as I help my comrades prepare for the Democratic Socialists of America’s national convention, to be held here in Chicago in only a few months. I’ll also be running for a leadership position in our local chapter — a prospect that, I must admit, fills …
Showtime’s new dramedy series, I’m Dying Up Here, is definitely a product of its time. The question is, what time is that? Is it the early 1970s, when the series is set? Is it the mid-1980s, when any schmuck with a colorful shirt and a rap about bad drivers could get …
The news that Hillary Clinton, during her time as the First Lady of Arkansas, was in charge of a staff that consisted of unpaid prison labor is…well, not exactly news. It’s a ‘revelation’ published in her own memoir, written and published over twenty years ago, and only recently rediscovered by a …
There is a school of thought which says that an artist, to do truly effective work, must always keep the audience — any audience, even an imaginary one — in mind. I’ve never quite believed this to be true. Except in the case of explicitly commercial work, an artist can (I …
So here we are again, talking about materialist dialectics vs. identity politics as if the two could exist independently of one another. Longtime readers will know that I’ve struggled with this issue for years, and the stark contradictions between what I will describe for the sake of convenience as the …
