The Blue Butterfly: Castle goes noir
Last week, the networks dredged up their usual parade of dreck in advance of Valentine’s Day, apparently under the belief that viewers needed Very Special Love-Saturated Episodes to prepare...
Category: Themes
What Love Looks Like: Seeing Valentine’s Day Anew
Who likes to show Valentine's Day a bit of love? Show of hands. I, for one, never have, because it has seemed to me that squishing expressions of love into one day of socially-approved...
Genre trouble: Re-reading Stella Gibbon’s Starlight
Stella Gibbons is best known for 1932’s Cold Comfort Farm, a sublimely comic novel that satirised the grim, rural works of writers like Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. Cold Comfort Farm is...
Whose Streets? Claiming Public Space and Occupying Oakland
As we marched down the road a man with his face covered in a black bandanna ran up to me and tapped me on the shoulder, pointing to the intersection ahead of us. “The police are up there,” he...
Syrian Uprising: The Possibility of Democratic Transformation
I do not know what to say about Syria. As the situation on the ground descends into what Al Jazeera reports may become a civil war, the tools available to those of us who comment from afar seem...
The peculiar rite of watching the Super Bowl ads
One of the most anticipated annual television events of the year unfolded in the United States over the weekend. Akin to the Doctor Who Christmas Special in the UK, it is practically a national...
Review: Tyrannosaur
Joseph is a rampaging shambles of a man, a wounded dinosaur looking for a tar pit to curl up and die in. His meteor hit long ago throwing up a black cloud of hate that blots out the Sun and the...
Why Obama and His GOP Rivals Should Be Talking about Foreign Policy even though ‘Americans Don’t Care’ about It
“Americans don’t care about foreign policy.” It’s a truism that has shaped presidential campaign rhetoric for both the Democrats and Republicans this year. It is also why, we are told,...
Spartacus: Bloody Great or Just Plain Bloody?
After a bit of a production delay, Spartacus: Vengeance kicked off the season with a bloodbath from beginning to end, interspersed with the occasional soft-core porn. The Starz adaptation of the...
Television Shows That Need to Die
There comes a time when even the greatest of television shows must be brought to a graceful and quiet end; see, for example, the stellar and possibly unbeatable closure in Six Feet Under’s finale...