Arts & Culture

It's getting hard to keep up with all the planned 30 Rock guest appearances, isn't it? We need a calendar.

Last week Jennifer Aniston was announced. Then Oprah joined her. And now, Entertainment Weekly has confirmed that Gossip Girl stars Leighton Meester and Blake Lively will appear on the multi-Emmy nominated comedy during November sweeps in a flashback as former high school classmates of Tina Fey's Liz Lemon.

As fans of both shows, this mash-up is like a dream come true. But considering that neither show has any real audience to speak of, is this a wise move?  read more »

Nothing to Be Frightened Of
By Julian Barnes
Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $24.95

I’m borderline obsessed by Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade.” It’s a pitiless meditation on death; a frank confession of fear; a swift rebuke to religion (“That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade”); and a weary recognition that despite the dread moment of personal extinction, life will go on—dawn will come again:

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

I’m particularly hung up on the word “rented.” We live in a rented world—and the landlord, alas, can evict us without any notice whatsoever.

In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his own meandering, book-length meditation on mortality, Julian Barnes calls “Aubade” Larkin’s “great death-poem.  read more »

Well here's one movie we're definitely not going to make it through without crying. We can't even read the news article from MSNBC without tearing up.

Sony Pictures is in negotiations to secure the rights to the story of Christian the hugging lion and the two men, John Rendall and Anthony "Ace" Bourke, who adopted him. The movie will be based off their 1972 book, A Lion Called Christian. There was also a 1971 documentary about the boys reuniting with Christian, but this will apparently be a dramatized version. We'd rather go for the doc, but the new deal is a testament to the power of YouTube and viral cuteness.  read more »

We're tuning into our desktops more and more these days. The Conference Board, a business research organization, and market research firm TNS Global have the proof! According to their recent report, online viewership of television broadcasts has almost doubled since 2006. One-fifth of families fire up the laptop instead of the big screen. The top two destinations were the official TV channel homepage and YouTube.com. Nine out of ten online viewers check out videos and TV shows at home. But about 15 percent are catching up on Heroes at their workplace. Tsk tsk!

Here's more from the report:

The top five types of shows viewed online are news, drama, sitcom/comedy, reality shows and sports, with user generated content following close behind.

 read more »

Michael Moore is pulling a Radiohead. He's releasing his next new film online at Blip.tv. Slacker Uprising takes us on a 62-city tour during the 2004 election with Mr. Moore, who is rallying young people into the voting booths. It will be available for three weeks as a free download to North American residents, beginning Sept. 23.

This is the first major movie to be released in such a way, according to the Associated Press.  read more »

Here’s a teensy weensy spoiler about what’s ahead in season five of HBO’s Entourage, which starts on Sunday night. Johnny Drama gets the best line, and it involves the word “meth” (trust us: the crowd at the Ziegfeld theater for the premiere on Wednesday night roared). Beyond that, we’ll try not to ruin any surprises for what seems (hopefully) to be a return to what made Entourage so much fun in the first place.

When it first aired in the summer of 2004, Entourage bestowed a little La La Land glitz and glamour to the HBO landscape, which was sorely missing with the then-recent departure of the Sex and the City gals.  read more »

Another good way of killing time: doing random YouTube searches for old movie scenes and trailers. And the good folks over at the Times Online have just given us a hit list. Earlier this week the London paper posted Alfred Hitchcock's 50 most memorable moments, complete with a little description of each and a YouTube link to the scene in question (or, in some cases, as much of the scene as was available.) And while the list is incredibly generic at times (the shower scene in Psycho is No. 1) there are still tons of great choices on here to get excited about.  read more »

East Village Radio has been streaming online shows for the past five years but you've probably been missing out on all their awesome jams. Our Friday night always gets warmed up with an episodes of The Let Out (run by our buds at Fader Magazine) from 6-8 p.m. and Mark Ronson's Authentic Shit keeps us going from 8-10 p.m. We often found ourselves wandering to their funny little booth at 1st and 1st to say hey to the local DJs. And we subscribe to the podcasts too.

In celebration of their half-decade anniversary, EVR is having a big bash at Pier 17 at South Street Seaport this Saturday, Aug. 6 from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Superstar DJ Mark Ronson himself was just added to the (free!) concert line-up, which also includes KRS-ONE, Boris, Devin the Dude, Awesome Color, Vivian Girls, Flying Lotus, High Places, Dr. Lonnie Smith, The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble and John Oliver of The Daily Show.

If you're out of town for the weekend, you can listen live on eastvillageradio.com.  read more »

We love former Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein. We love SNL funny-man Fred Armisen. And you should love ThunderAnt, a video blog in which Armisen and Brownstein collaborate on a particularly quirky brand of sketch comedy parodying everything from feminist bookstores to Mr. Saddam Hussein. Their riotous new sketch, "One Man Show," takes on performance art—something we, well, don’t love.  read more »