It is my impression that individual critics don’t have all that much impact over the mass media arts. Movies, TV, music, mass market books are so spread over the culture and reviewed by so many different critics that even the biggest names in the biggest venues have relatively little impact …

Spike Lee has kind of drifted off from my attention sphere over the last 10 years or so, but man, does he hit the nail on the head regarding the fantasy world of “reality” TV, and I would apply his very sensible reasoning to the lottery as well: Spike Lee …

Cyberpunk legend William Gibson has a new book, website and blog. For those of you who don’t know the author of NEUROMANCER, this is a bio, and for those who do there is a discussion board. Here is an excerpt from the new book, Pattern Recognition: THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL …

Confirming earlier speculation, Richard Parsons will become chairman of AOL Time Warner when Steve Case goes away in May: Richard D. Parsons was chosen yesterday to replace Steve Case as chairman of AOL Time Warner Inc., a move that will put the 54-year-old chief executive fully in charge of running …

The Gobbles security advisory about the RIAA was a hoax, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t messing with you: For two years Warne worked for the global version of the RIAA, the IFPI which represents 1500 labels in 76 countries, with headquarters in London. The IFPI’s primary mission is to …

Glenn Reynolds, who is ubiquitous this week, now has his own MSNBC blog because he has nothing better to do. Glenn remarks on the ramifications of a little-discussed aspect of the Eldred decision on the new blog, dedicated to “technology, culture, politics and the law”: In passing the Sonny Bono …

Charges dropped against the “Racine 441″ (somehow reduced to 440), the ravers arrested in November under the city’s “inmate of a disorderly house/controlled substances” ordinance. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has the story: The 440 multi-pierced, electronic-music-loving party-goers who were stung with $968 citations for attending a rave party gained a …

In his Wall Street Journal column, Daniel Henninger both excoriates the bulk of mass pop culture output as exemplified by “cross-market synergy,” yet celebrates access to the idiosyncratic outposts afforded by the same technology that shovels the sludge: To put any one “product” (film, singer, or characters created by a …

Tom Moon waxes philosophical in the Chicago Tribune on the almost-infinite interchangeability of music facilitated by the iPod, where mixing and matching can turn into a sophisticated exercise in music appreciation: Something radical happens when you disengage from physical discs and tapes, when you collapse the distance separating “rock,” “jazz” …

Gary Farber has an interesting post on being interviewed, edited, reinterviewed, reedited, condensed, then eliminated from the NY Times’ profile on Glenn Reynolds that ran yesterday – very fine article by the way, capturing both the quotidian rhythms of Glenn’s day, and the awe most of us feel at his …