September has delivered strong albums from Miranda Lambert and Mika. Here are my reviews. What do you think?

[Read more →]

As you may remember, I recently joined the Theatre Development Fund (TDF) as their Online Content Manager. I’m writing theatre features every week and having ludicrous amounts of fun doing it.

Here are the highlights from this week’s publishing escapades…

(1) First up, we’ve got a two-part series on New York’s Asian and Asian-American theatre community. In part one, I look at two Korean-language musicals currently playing in Manhattan, and I ask, “Can you get something out of these shows if you don’t speak Korean?”

In part two, I break it down with the major New York companies that are dedicated to Asian-American theatre. What does “Asian-American” mean to these artists? Has their notion of minority theatre (or for that matter, minority culture)changed?

(2) Next, there’s an interview with Tony Award winner Doug Hughes, who is in the unique position of directing two Broadway plays at the same time. How does he juggle the revival of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s comedy The Royal Family with David Mamet’s sexual harassment drama Oleanna, especially since they open three days apart?

*The photo comes from Joan Marcus. It features Hughes directing Oleanna co-stars Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles.

So… FlashForward. The pilot was good, but not great, since it played like an episode of Lost created by people who are afraid that Lost is too confusing. Therefore, characters re-explained major plot points like it was their damn job. I mean, you only have to tell me that everyone on the planet fell asleep simultaneously, like, fifteen times. The sixteenth time is overkill.

Of course, there are times after a hard day of work when I don’t mind having a show do all my thinking for me, so for now, I’m in.

Besides, FlashForward leads me to flights of fancy. The premise is just delicious: Everyone on the planet blacked out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and while they were out, they had dreams about what they would be doing on April 29 around 10:00 PM. (Which just happens to be the date and time when a new episode of FlashForward will premiere. Wild!)

Just imagine if this happened to you. What if you were driving a bus when you blacked out? D’oh! What if you saw the future, and you were on the toilet (as happens to a character in the series?)

That would be bad. But it could be worse. After the jump, I’ll share the suckiest ways to flash forward…

[Read more →]

Over the next year, Yahoo! is spending $100 million (!!) to boost its image around the world. Apparently, they want to revive their brand in countries like the U.S., and they want to gain traction for the first time in other parts of the world.

Now I don’t know about the rest of you, but personally, I think of Yahoo! as a search engine, a place to sign up for instant messaging, and the home of two fantastic pop music columns….

Okay… a quick surf just reminded me that Yahoo! also hosts Flickr. But whatever. Of all the things I listed, the music columns are the only ones I actually utilize on a regular basis.

I guess this makes me the prime target for the Yahoo’s branding revitalization. After the jump, you can see the first commercial that supposed to get me hollerin’. Will it work?

[Read more →]

So far, it’s a great season for new sitcoms cast in the Arrested Development mold. Both Community and Modern Family follow their predecessor’s lead by delivering highly exaggerated worlds in which characters are always ready with snappy quips and plots unfold with architectural precision. The writers don’t pretend their stories are “real,” but instead revel in their own ingenuity as they inflate recognizable life into ridiculous new proportions.

“Recognizable” is the operative word, however. No matter how crazy they get, the most successful “crafted” sitcoms are always rooted in some kind of humanity. Beneath the Bluth family’s obsession with The Cornballer, for instance, there’s a familiar portrait of family dynamics. Behind the elaborate Amadeus parody on 30 Rock, there’s the empathetic story of a woman trying live up to her own image of a perfect life.

Of Community and Modern Family, the latter seems more invested in this type of humanity, which is why I’m guessing it will be my favorite.
I mean, the show is just so refreshingly kindhearted. The characters do ridiculous things—schedule times to punish the children, announce the adoption of a Vietnamese baby with a Lion King-style musical number—but the series doesn’t mock them for it, the way a show like Hung uses every antic situation to underscore what losers its characters are. In Modern Family, which revolves around three small clans who are all related to each other, we  see the characters are acting out of affection for each other. They’re loopy because they care.

Meanwhile, Community, which follows an unlikely group of friends at a community college, seems more driven by self-referential wit. Characters discuss how they’re doing things that bring sitcom characters closer together. A scene where two guys make fools of themselves in Spanish class goes on so long so that it’s as much about what the writers can get away with as it is about propelling the story.
But don’t get me wrong: The Spanish class scene is hilarious. And Community has moments of real heart, just like Modern Family makes room for meta-gags.

Based on early impressions, however, I feel like Community will be the series to enjoy, and Modern Family will be the series to love.

What do you think?

Hey y’all… I am swamped with work today, so I can’t stay long. I just wanted to pop in and say that even though I’ve been enjoying my white noise machine at bedtime for many years, I only today discovered the joy of white noise in the workplace.

You see, my office has an open-air plan, which means I hear everyone’s conversations, even when I’m trying to write a feature that will no doubt change the face of theatrical journalism (right?) The chaos makes it hard to focus, but this morning, joy of joys, I discovered SimplyNoise, a website that has free downloads of white, brown, and pink noise audio files. With my headphones in my speakers, and white noise in my headphones, my life has gotten much, much easier.

That’s all for now. Have a great weekend!

Did you see last night’s episode of Top Chef, in which contestants had to deconstruct a dish the way Vegas staples Penn & Teller deconstruct magic tricks on stage? If you did, then maybe you learned as much as I did.

Here are two revelations I’ve taken to heart…

(Mild spoilers ahead)

[Read more →]

If I think Sandra Bullock seems appealing in The Blind Side, does that mean I’m a racist?

Let’s watch the trailer, and then I’ll explain…

[Read more →]

The 61st Annual Primetime Emmy Awards will air on Sunday night, but Doug Strassler and I couldn’t wait that long. We’ve been e-mailing about the nominees all week, and let me tell you, we got sassy. (Hence the term “sassologue” in the title of the post.)

After the jump, I’m pleased to present the highlights of our exchange. Woot-woot!

[Read more →]

What should we call this crazy decade? I’ve been calling it “The Aughts,” but is that good enough? Guest critic Tray Butler, an author an illustrator of enormous awesomeness, doesn’t think so…

—

Not the Aughts: Go With the Ohs

By Tray Butler

As much as I’ve been digging Mark’s countdown of the 101 Best Songsof the Aughts, I can’t help stumbling over semantics. Seriously, are we really settling on “aughts” to describe this debacle of a decade?

With 2009 staggering to a close, I’m seeing the term show up in stories here and there as the inevitable decade-in-review deluge begins to bubble up. Music writers seem especially keen on the sound of it, for some reason, or maybe they’re just an obvious group prone to list-making and navel-gazing.

No offense meant to anyone, but to me “aughts” comes across as both pretentious and antiquated, with visions of buggy whips and bootstraps that are worlds away from the whiz-bang digital flavor of our current age. “Aughts” sounds a little too much like “ought,” one of those archaic holdovers from Middle English that today feels awkward on the tongue. I just can’t hear “aughts” thrown around in casual conversation. Can you imagine, 10 years from now: “Dude, that old Blackberry you had was sooo aughts.” Um, no thanks.

People tend to wrinkle their noses when they hear the word “aughts” —though, to be fair, no one I’ve mentioned this to has offered a better alternative. Terms like “the zeros,” “the 2000’s,” “the new millennium” and, worst of all, “the naughties” all miss the mark.

I know I’m not the first word nerd to wrestle this conundrum; Slate’s Timothy Noah wrote an excellent piece on naming the decade in 2005 that holds every bit as true today. As Noah pointed out, the New York Times tried to beat everyone to the punch by declaring that the first decade of the 21st century should be called “the ohs”
way back in the 1980s. (A quick search of the Times site shows that the old gray lady seems to have ignored her own advice, though she’s also stayed off the “aughts” bandwagon, somehow.)

Now, with just 15 weeks left until 2010 hits, I find myself agreeing with the Times. Of all the terms I’ve heard floating around out there, I believe “the ohs” best sums up the spirit of the era. These past 10 years have been positively swimming in “oh” moments, as in, “Oh hell, did the Supreme Court seriously just hand the election to George W. Bush?”
Or, “Oh my god, did we really just invade Iraq for no legitimate reason?” Or even, “Oh shit, if Britney Spears flashes her cha-cha at the paparazzi one more time, I think I might puke in my mouth.”

“Oh!” also speaks to the financial meltdown of the past year, which Time called the end of the Age of Excess. “O” is for over-indulgence.

I like the elegance of “oh,” which can evoke both surprise and resignation. And not to get all crispy and New Agey here, but the “O” says something about both emptiness and completion, a people who have come full circle and now find themselves back at the start.

This has been a terrifically turbulent decade, defined by the two bookends of 9-11 and the Great Recession. Or, on a more positive note, marked by the worldwide celebration of the new millennium and the outpouring of hope and optimism we saw during last year’s Obama lovefest. (There’s another “O” for you.)

True, “the ohs” has its flaws and might cause confusion when written as “the ’00s.” Using “the aughts” appears to be gaining traction as a meme, and it may already be too late to stop it from becoming the
phrase of choice.

Then again, given the state of the global economy, perhaps we should be arguing for “the owes” instead. Oh, the humanity!

Tray Butler is an author and illustrator currently based in London. His travel guide, the Moon Atlanta handbook, is now available from Avalon Travel. Read more at Trayb.com.