#ch

Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream. ↗

— James Wolcott

#before #collective #culture #enriches #iconography

My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich. ↗

— James Wolcott

#high-school #like #mailer #norman #norman mailer

Pop music has been all but relegated to the remainder bin at MTV and VH1, where high-maintenance concoctions such as Paris Hilton, Flavor Flav, and Hulk Hogan's biohazard clan of bleached specimens provide endless hours of death-hastening diversion. ↗

— James Wolcott

#bin #bleached #clan #diversion #endless

The unhappy irony is that, while 'Glee' is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues. ↗

— James Wolcott

#arts #being #country #declining #due

There was a time when idealistic folksingers such as myself believed that Reality TV was a programming vogue that would peak and recede, leaving only its hardiest show-offs. Instead, it has metastasized like toxic mold, filling every nook and opening new crannies. ↗

— James Wolcott

#every #filling #idealistic #instead #leaving

Everybody knows things are not the same. The people running the TV end of a major vertically integrated company know how much money a successful show can make. ↗

— Dick Wolf

#end #everybody #how #integrated #know

What's happening to movie critics is no different from what has been meted out to book, dance, theater, and fine-arts reviewers and reporters in the cultural deforestation that has driven refugees into the diffuse clatter of the Internet and Twitter, where some adapt and thrive - such as Roger Ebert - while others disappear without a twinkle. ↗

— James Wolcott

#been #book #critics #cultural #dance

Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with 'Hardly Working' and 'Cracking Up.' ↗

— James Wolcott

#adam sandler #badly #cable #catch #chunk

With Barack Obama as president and the super-happening Michelle Obama as First Lady, you would think a new tone, a new tune, a kicky new jazzitude, would have entered Washington discourse, but it remains a landlocked island unto itself, held captive by its tribal fevers. ↗

— James Wolcott

#barack obama #captive #discourse #entered #fevers

The labour of the farmers, no doubt is of greater value than the financial capacity of the government and non-government institutions which can only play a supportive role. ↗

— Girma Woldegiorgis

#doubt #farmers #financial #government #greater