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journalismism
not afraid to be servicey
How Not To Charm A Restaurant Critic
Frank Bruni is pissed! The New York Times' omnipotent restaurant critic (pictured) today reviews a new Tribeca restaurant named Ago, which is owned in part by actor Robert De Niro. And Bruni's experience there is proof for the entire restaurant business that no matter how popular, expensive, or exclusive your place is, it is still quite possible to receive a terrible review if you act like an idiot. Please: Learn some lessons from Ago's fiasco. Here is what not to do when your restaurant is being reviewed: More »
law
R. Kelly Sex Tape Trial Finally Gets Interesting
Music superstar R. Kelly's criminal trial for taping himself having sex with an underage girl has been so bland and subdued, we've just been waiting for a newsworthy reason to cover it. And now we have it: there's a legal issue in the case that affects a member of the media in some way! Why, this is almost as exciting as a music superstar's kinky child sex tape scandal! More »
gender studies
Baby Mama Will Tell Us What To Think About Women
So Tina Fey's new movie Baby Mama comes out today! It's a very important movie because it will once and for all decide if she is the funniest woman in America or absolutely no one. Yes indeed. And in doing so, Tina Fey will finally determine for all of us if, in fact, women are funny. You see this isn't just a comedy with a woman in it. It's a comedy starring a woman! A woman with her own TV show! And her costar is a woman too! Not since Gloria Steinem wrote and directed the Cameron Diaz vehicle The Sweetest Thing has there been such an important comedy film for and about womyn (that was written and directed by a man). This is the most important 96 minutes of Ms. Fey's career, but also in the history of our gender war. It's important that we go into the theater informed, so we may properly participate in this historic debate. After the jump find a small digest of the film's reviews. More »
the critics
How to Deal With Critics Without Looking Like an Idiot
Writing is hard, lonely work. At least that's what all the great writers say, so that's the line to stick to at dinner parties. But when your Great American Novel is complete, there's loads of self-congratulations. And after that, praise from friends and family. But then strangers who went to better colleges than you, the critics, come in to eviscerate you in 600 words. How is a writer to a respond? Violence? Sex? Passive-aggressive letters?More »
diets
Fat Food Critic Has Death Wish
Did you know that people who write about food for a living tend to be fatties? It's true! Except for the Times' dreamy James Bond of gastronomy, Frank Bruni. The point is that some food critics have realized that scarfing down daily heapings of pork bellies and passing it off as a professional expense is no guarantee they won't keel over from a heart attack, and is a guarantee they will have a hard time seeing their own genitals. Even pork-loving wild man Mario Batali is threatening to start exercising! By chasing a greased sow in his Crocs, perhaps. But even while some of the wiser gluttons are easing back, says the Times, their stupider brethren—embodied by one man—just can't stop with the sausage: More »
lil wayne
Toast Of White Rap Critics Hit With Bottle By Unimpressed Londoners
Lil Wayne is the tattooed, drugged-out New Orleans rapper who, for some reason, causes spasms of hero worship among white internet rap critics. The extent of the enthusiasm for him has always been a total mystery to me, but it's almost comical watching rap nerds try to outdo each other with their verbose online praise for Wayne, who would certainly rather be drinking vast quantities of Robitussin and liquor than reading their bullshit. Anyways, he got booed off the stage at his recent concert in London, and then showered with bottles on his way out, for good measure. Guess the crowd didn't read all the right blogs before they went to the show. After the jump, two recent examples of internerd Wayne worship, and the video of his ill-fated exit in London. I must admit I find this highly enjoyable.More »
things we actually like
Immigrants Still Taking Our Jobs, Awards
Hispaniola-born Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat swept the National Book Critics Awards, winning for the The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and for Brother, I'm Dying. Díaz beat out real American writers like Joyce Carol Oates for the prize. But for serious, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is one of the best books I've read in a long time, and you'd be a fool to let some perverse form of patriotism to stop you from enjoying it. [USA Today] Bonus recommendation: Junot Díaz's interview with Terri Gross nearly made me cry. No judgment!
bad critics
Is Lenny Kravitz The Least Literate Writer To Appear In the New York Times Ever?
The New York Times recently asked playboy rockstar Lenny Kravitz to expose his playlist. His answers may go down as the least well-put thing the New York Times has ever printed. It also ranks quite strongly on the Julia Allison Scale of Lack Of Self-Awareness (JASLOSA). Waxing poetic on Devendra Banhart, Kravitz write, " I just think it’s really great. The song “Saved” is just incredible. He has this crazy voice, and it’s this gospel kind of thing. It sounds like the song that rolls over the end title credits to some incredible movie. It’s really well produced and recorded. I like his style. He’s completely himself." Trenchant critique, that! It's not like Kravitz is busy making love or anything. He could have actually strung some words together that actually made sense. But nope. After the jump, some more Kravitzian prose and some bonus videos too! More »
Critic Luc Sante has started a blog about pictures of things. "I won't pretend to specialize or present myself as an expert in anything," he promises. So far, so good! [Pinakothek]
Charles Kaiser, author of "The Gay Metropolis" and the go-to man on New York Times exegesis, and also the man I have been stalking for years because he seriously needs to be my gay lover, is now the Monday media critic for Radar. His first column today is a passel of crazy and it could not be more enjoyable. He trashes Andrew Sullivan and Howie Kurtz, interviews Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal (who calls Times executive editor Bill Keller "crazy"), disses that ridiculous Obama-in-New-York story from last week, and counts the white people on the Sunday T.V. chatshows (answer: all of them). [Radar]
1. "In this image released by the U.S. Army, [soldiers] pass a burning vehicle in Hussein Hamadi village, Diyala Province, Iraq, Monday, Oct. 29, 2007. during Operation Ultra Magnus. The joint operation was designed to clear the village, a former terrorist stronghold, of al-Qaeda operatives. (AP Photo/SSG Russell Bassett, US Army)" 2. "U.S. army soldiers secure an area after a roadside bomb blast in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, Nov. 1, 2007. A roadside bomb went off, killing five people near a shelter used as a police recruiting center in the Shiite-dominated neighborhood of Binouk, police said. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)"
"In previous movies, Michael Bay dabbled wearily in Homo sapiens. At last he has summoned the courage to admit that he has an exclusive crush on machines, and I congratulate him on creating, in "Transformers," his first truly honest work of art. Not that he needs my plaudits; as a passerby exclaims in the midst of the film, "This is easily a hundred times cooler than 'Armageddon'!" To be proud of your achievement is one thing, but to plant film critics inside your movie and review it favorably as you go along: that takes genius." [NYer]
idiots
'Time' Film Critic Has Never Met Any Critics
Richard Schickel, who's been the Time film critic since before most of us here were born, is also kind of a muttonhead! He went postal in Sunday's LA Times on the op-ed pages and denounced the (largely imagined) rise of amateur critics, and worse, the bloggers. Eek!Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.Schickel isn't really writing about the imagined rise of the blogger-critic; he's talking about the horrors of the uneducated folk writing criticism. He's also about 30 years late. More »
the trouble with critics
Michiko Kakutani Unabashedly Limns Again
As Galleycat recently Michiko Kakutani has been in a cheery mood of late, overusing "stunning" and "dazzling" on two novels already this month! But other bad habits seem to die considerably harder. From the second sentence of her review of Don DeLillo's Falling Man:His novels, from "Players" and "White Noise" through "Libra" and "Mao II" and the remarkable "Underworld," not only limned the surreal weirdness of the waning years of the 20th century, but somehow also managed to anticipate the shock and horror of 9/11 and its darkly unspooling aftermath.Whether or not you agree with Dennis Loy Johnson's famous defense of Michiko's limning, by this point, would it kill her to toss us an "outlined" once in a while? A "sketched?" A "delineated"? We would totally settle for a "portrayed!"
the trouble with critics
Join The Bruni Cause—Or The Bruni Effect
A whorl of unanswerable questions have been encircling the hardbody of New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni. Keith McNally accused him of lady-hating. Phallic restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow accused him of pettiness. Now The Observer's Chris Shott accuses him of influence. Shott claims restaurants live or die by the Bruni review, a charge which Bruni accurately denies. More »
the pop-culturizing of criticism
What's Dark, Bald and Drives Frank Bruni Nuts?
Yes, it's Max Brenner, the wacky Israeli chocolate place-entity that invaded New York a while back. Only a Jewish mother or a Catholic gay could venture into a sweet chocolate wonderland and return so concerned. But sure—there is no surprise in the fact that Max Brenner is a gimmicky shitty crapshow, whose chocolate isn't even that great. Still it's a handy spot, because it gives the Times restaurant critic an excuse to bitch and make Willy Wonka references, two of his favorite things. But what's next—reviewing a McDonaldland playground in the Bronx? The search for the best Dunkin' Donuts? Defining the boundaries of high and low culture in critic-land is gonna get increasingly more difficult. More »
michiko kakutani
Divining the Truth: Who Knocked Michiko Kakutani?
So, surprise of surprises, this week's Time Out has a fairly interesting feature in which New York's professional critics are judged by a panel of experts. There aren't many shocks (The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones and Alex Ross are great music critics, Frank Bruni is inferior to his $25-and-Under colleague Peter Meehan, something about dance, etc.) but the gloves really come off when Times book critic Michiko Kakutani gets reviewed."Reactionary, mean-spirited. Has a permanent grudge against experiment, playfulness, subversion, perversity and complexity. Her reviews are predictable, dull, ugly, conservative, mocking and trite."Well, it's not an uncommon opinion. And she can be a little mean-spirited at times. More »
