Category Archives: Culture

Sunday is clearly the day for long-windedness in the New York Times. The paper leads with a 9,500-word investigation of the Lackawanna terror case (don’t ask me), complete with a 1,300-word kicker. And on the op-ed page, we’re subjected to … Continue reading →

Publishing on the internet has never been as easy as the technoütopians would have it. (This week, I’ve decided to maximise my use of the diaeresis: see this MemeFirst entry if you want to know why.) And after fiddling around … Continue reading →

DVD is a great medium: there’s a virtually limitless list of films available, they look much better than they do on VHS, and you can do things like freeze-frame much more effectively. But until now, the market has been dominated … Continue reading →

Who will stick up for PowerPoint? It’s always been the subject of low-level grumblings, and Lance Knobel points out that the World Economic Forum, in Davos (usually), has long had a "deep-rooted aversion" to allowing it into presentations. But ever … Continue reading →

I promise – promise – that this will be absolutely, positively, my last WTC post. This week, anyway. My piece yesterday was in response to some good questions which were asked back in January and which I felt I could … Continue reading →

Back from a long weekend, there’s lots of fabulous new stuff I want to blog about, but first I want to get the last of the WTC stuff off my chest. My last post, on the design revisions, got a … Continue reading →

It’s been over seven months since Daniel Libeskind was officially chosen as the architect in charge of the World Trade Center site, and a lot of us have been wondering what, if anything, has been going on. Well, today we … Continue reading →

Terry Teachout, arts blogger extraordinaire, reported Thursday on Zankel Hall, the new 650-seat auditorium at Carnegie Hall. I would link to its website, but I’m allergic to horrible Flash pages, so I shan’t. I was fascinated to read Teachout’s piece, … Continue reading →

Most journalists are pretty receptive to arguments about the importance of intellectual property: after all, we make a living producing just that. But at the same time, it’s often clear when things go too far. I’ve yet to hear a … Continue reading →

Four years ago, I went to a wonderful wedding on an island in the Thames, between a hot young MBA and a hotter, younger stand up comic turned newspaper columnist. The columnist, protocol be damned, decided she was going to … Continue reading →

It’s not been an easy week for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. The people who brought you one of the biggest public consultation exercises of all time – the one culminating in the decision to award Daniel Libeskind the mandate … Continue reading →

I went up to Dia:Beacon last month, and wrote it up for Loft magazine, available in English at all good Miami newsstands. For those of you without easy access to a Miami newsstand, however, here’s the article: enjoy! Since long … Continue reading →

Back in my protoblogging days, in March 2000, I posted an item on the old, low-tech felixsalmon.com disagreeing with a certain piece of advice given by Slate’s agony aunt, Dear Prudence. I don’t know what it is about Prudence which … Continue reading →

Many months ago, my grandmother told me that I should read a short book she’d just finished. We were on the telephone at the time, and it took a while for me to get the title straight: Pretty girl in … Continue reading →

I live with one of those arty-filmy types, who idolises Ingmar Bergman, and who forced me to get tickets to Ghosts when we were filling out our BAM subscription last year. Ghosts is a relatively minor Ibsen play which has … Continue reading →

Kasimir Malevich has long been one of my favourite artists, ever since I saw one of his great white-on-white paintings at Annely Juda as a teenager. There’s a handful of paintings which seared themselves into my consciousness the minute I … Continue reading →

I saw my first ever Cirque du Soleil show last night. Imagine that – 31 years old, and somehow I’d managed to avoid it until now. Snob that I am, I expected mass-market middlebrow entertainment, and went as much out … Continue reading →

Woody Allen has directed his first play, and it’s currently in previews at the Atlantic Theater Company in Chelsea. Actually, Writer’s Block is two plays: the first an absurdist take on marital infidelity set on the Upper West Side of … Continue reading →

A couple of weeks ago, I was quite rude about those who take their literature extremely seriously. Today, in order to redress the balance a little, I’d like to respond to the opposite tendency: the idea, as Michael Blowhard puts … Continue reading →

If New York didn’t know about Dia:Beacon before, surely it does now. A massive Richard Serra piece dwarfs a black-clad gallery-goer on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, which inside runs a 6,500-word opus by Michael Kimmelman all … Continue reading →

It’s been a while (over six years, to be precise), but I think I’ve been living in New York for long enough now that I can finally weigh in on the subject of Britain in general, and London in particular, … Continue reading →

MemeFirst has responded to Puma’s cease and desist letter. Trademark lawyer Martin Schwimmer was kind enough to draft a response both for us and for AdRants, and you can download a PDF file of it here. If you don’t want … Continue reading →

Memefirst received an official (and officious) letter from Puma today, telling us to "IMMEDIATELY cease and desist from all further display, use and publication of the offensive PUMA image". Why are they shouting? Why is "immediately" in all caps? No … Continue reading →

Yes, they’re fake. They have no connection with Puma at all. They’re not real ads tweaked in Photoshop, they didn’t run in Brazilian Maxim, they’re not viral marketing by a top-secret Puma subsidiary. They’re fakes, and Puma doesn’t like them … Continue reading →

Music has been becoming increasingly Balkanised for many years now. From the days of Gregorian chant to the present, there’s been an almost teleological progression: the number of different types of music has increased, while the audience for any given … Continue reading →