We used to be a proper c — [hand to earpiece] Sorry. *They* used to be a proper country.

Man Who Thought Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ Was Over In For Thrill Of His Fucking Life https://theonion.com/man-who-thought-fleetwood-macs-the-chain-was-over-in-for-thrill-of-his-fucking-life/

The damned in hell are not more powerful for the fact that the fires do not consume them; it is part and parcel of their torment.

But the wet bandits are also gods. They take fatal injury after fatal injury and they just dust themselves off and continue their relentless pursuit of Kevin. It should be horrifying, but Kevin’s innocence obscures this.

you were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg

Somehow I missed that Matthew Barney had another film out in 2023, but it’s nice to know that he is having, as ever, a normal one. youtu.be/LWZv0rgdUuI?...

Lily Allen’s “Tennis” features maybe the neatest bit of parsimonious voice leading that I’ve ever encountered in pop music. (And maybe delete the “in pop music” part??)

I just had a student come argue with me that a definition I used on a test was not quite correct, for essentially political reasons: he understood what I wanted the answer to be, but he was like “maybe that’s the way people do use that term, but not the way we should use that term…”

Hey programming friends: come work with me! I am awesome and so is my entire department. DMs open for questions, and please feel free to reach out even if you don't know me well. careers.msu.edu/jobs/special...

Kindergarten sent home a cardboard cutout of a Turkey and told us “disguise your turkey as something else so he won’t get picked for the Thanksgiving turkey hunt!” My son decided that the turkey should be disguised as… a roast turkey saying “Thanksgiving turkey! Eat up!”

I feel like Kyle McLachlan might be doing the best work of his career in The Lowdown. Which is weird to say - it’s a good show, and a good character, but not *particularly* interesting compared to other stuff he’s done? There’s nothing you can point to and say “what an electrifying performance!”

Suspiria is a legitimate masterpiece, but the razor wire thing is so fundamentally unserious. “Why do they even HAVE that lever?”

Extremely funny to imagine anyone reading about the Louvre heist and scrabbling for their phone to shout “Get me Dan Brown’s hot take!” Like. A solitary synapse firing in the darkness. Louvre. Louvre. Where have I heard that word before? Oh! That conspiracy novel from (checks notes) *22 years ago*

“Oh, so now it’s a problem that he has a tattoo?” is maybe the single most intellectually dishonest take that I have ever seen on the internet. Do you really, *really* mean to say that you think people are mad about the nazi tattoo not because it is nazi but just because it’s a tattoo?

CHOTINER: So you knew he was saving them for breakfast. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: Probably! I said he *probably* was saving them for breakfast. CHOTINER: But you ate them anyway? WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: Look —

don’t you dare be AI

Someone on here said “can we put whoever convinced us all to stomp lanternflies in charge of messaging,” and like… The thing about “stomp lanternflies” is that it gives us a chance to be brutal, while believing that our brutality is Good. And that is basically the cocaine of ideologies.

If you all would like to feel sad and scared, the podcast “In Bed With the Right” has been doing a series of episodes called Project 1933 where they track, month by month, the way that German civil society fell to the Nazis during their first year in power. rss.com/podcasts/inb...

It’s increasingly obvious that the power of the far-right supermajority on the Supreme Court has to be broken if the republic is going to be saved. (Whether that looks like court packing or impeachment doesn’t really matter.)

We used to be a proper country.

a surprising number of these boil down to “just be Robocop,” but #12 is right out

About once a year I get to make a joke about how the only representation of musicologists in film is Dario Argento’s INFERNO, but to be fair we do listen to Va Pensiero on headphones and then get menaced by ancient witches a lot

remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature

I wish this was less true than it is

Watching Hedwig and the Angry Inch for the first time since… before I started thinking seriously about film music, and the role of the diegetic audience is so interesting in this movie.

Gathering materials for my Broadway course. Funnily enough, unlike opera (where you have to hope that it’s on Alexander Street or go scan a hard copy yourself), librettos and even scores for many shows are just… out there on the internet. (The reasons are pretty obvious when you think about it.)

how loud is it possible to shout WAGNER over the internet

oh man imagine a vampire elephant though, just point the tusks downward

Finishing up my syllabus for a course on Broadway (a first for me). It feels insane to me that The Music Man and West Side Story both premiered in 1957. The music, the plots, the characters they depict… the AMERICA they depict, all feel like they belong in different decades, if not centuries.

One of my favorite things to do is to actually read a book that we all just sort of know through cultural osmosis. There’s always something surprising.

Truly sad that “getting a degree at Columbia” is going to be right up there with “being really into Viking religion” on the list of things that are like — look, I’m not *definitely* saying you’re a white supremacist, but I am saying that’s strike fucking one.

Paul Hollywood would probably beat me with a stick for this presentation, but this was a good Linzer torte. (I mixed vanilla extract and angostura bitters into the raspberry jam to add a little depth to the flavor - quite happy with how that turned out.)

The book I'm citation-checking cites a 1933 newspaper article with the headline "Woman's Life Replete with Varied Drama."

If we know each other IRL, remind me to make korokke for you one of these days.

“As a large language model, I’ve… seen things, you people wouldn’t believe.”

Made it about three min. into Clair Obscur before I had to restart and set the spoken dialogue to French, just to sustain my suspension of disbelief.

Bill Clinton was talking to a friend of mine in a store, and I zipped over to them, and both of them thought “oh, he wants to be introduced” but in fact I had not even noticed Bill Clinton, so I just talked to my friend for 5 min and then left while Clinton sat there waiting for me to include him.

Man, if they had ANY evidence that would hold up against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, they would have shouted it to the rooftops to try to sway public opinion against bringing him home.

A visit from the local fauna

TIL: When the Original Star Wars Trilogy finally aired on Chilean TV in 2003, the network spliced custom beer commercials into the films themselves to avoid cutting to commercial breaks. these additional scenes turn Obi-Wan & Luke into raging space alcoholics who are constantly shotgunning booze.

[Imogen Heap voice]: hide… and… squeak edition.cnn.com/2019/09/13/e...

I can’t tell if all of the wide angle technicolor ***Landscape*** in the 1955 version of Oklahoma! makes it the best possible version of Oklahoma!, or if, somehow, it actually kills it dead.

Grading time — which means slasher films and musicals on in the background. The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) has to be the slasher-iest slasher film in existence. So clichéd at every moment that you stop registering anything as a cliché, and it’s just like “dead dove: do not eat,” the movie.

please tell me the name of this piece is “tuba mirum”

LRT(S?) has me thoughtful and sad. I’ve been moving away from requiring papers in my undergrad classes because it feels like incentivizing cheating. But the only reason I know how to write, at all, is that I had to crank out 6-10 mediocre term papers per year, every year, for a solid decade or so…