It’s a long clip (c. 16 minutes), but it’s a doozy. And it starts with a swell vertical tracking shot.
Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) is widely regarded as the first British talkie, and this clip testifies to his genius and self-promotional acumen. Right off the bat, as film was still struggling to develop its own [...]

Anny Ondra, in a promotional still from Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929)

“The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to sales. But: Over the course of the past decade, a lot of people just stopped giving a shit about music altogether. Yet the survey, its results (from what I’ve seen) and the discussions of it don’t seem to consider this at all.”
This [...]

A new track from The Field, the first from his forthcoming Yesterday and Today LP, called “The More That I Do,” is available in downloadable form. Predictably, it’s good. But a different kind of good than the icy winds of From Here We Go Sublime: it’s still based around a fat rhythm bed, [...]

My Tinted Windows game has caught on! (At least in Idolator’s comment section). People are approaching the boy-band timeframe liberally (some NKOTB in there), but that’s OK. I particularly like the all-British one, and Maura’s picks.

If a band wants to conjure up a satisfying series of earthy hippie brews, it seems like they’ll eventually have to mix in a bit of patriarchy. In an earlier period of my life, I might say about “My Girls” something like “Hey Noah, it’s all well and good that your intent isn’t [...]

Which shouldn’t be surprising, of course. The group comprises four seasoned pros bent on re-branding themselves as a B-Team power-pop Traveling Wilburys. It says something when your presumed charisma-bearer is the Kid Who Looked Like A Cute Eighth Grade Girl in Hanson 12 years ago. This is a group of guys proud [...]

As I’m sitting here watching my Interpersonal Comm. students take an exam today (update: something which I’m still doing), my friend Maura pops up in my IM window with a question. She was wondering as to the validity of this particular study (warning: not in English), and more specifically, this arstechnica article citing it. [...]

“During my first week back in Liberia I had been invited to Hawa’s birthday party, on Sembehun Beach, not far for Robertsport, so I passed some time with the ladies while they were preparing western-style food for everyone: rice, beef stake, pasta and potato salad. Then they started stirring what would have to be two [...]