MEDIA MONDAY
What have you been reading, listening to, and watching?

Doug enthusiastically recommends Art Brut's single, "Formed a Band"! Their official home page appears to be here.

Lewberry recommends the documentary The Weather Underground, now on DVD.

"When I Was Four I Knew I was Weird."
The Guardian has an intervew with Robert Crumb, who is about to have a retrospective art showing in London. He is one strange bird. The documentary about him, Crumb, is one of the more disturbing film portraits I've ever seen, perhaps most of all when you realize that he is the normal one of his family. I have a hard time being moved much by his very honest artistic expressions when they are so clearly that of a racist and a textbook misogynist. And that's just how his wife describes him. If all he did was marvel over the butt of Serena Williams--as he does here--without drawing pictures of himself having sex with headless women, he might be a more charming neurotic.

Famous Wrappers
Edward Sozanski of the Philadelphia Inquirer offers his closing thoughts on The Gates

Give the artists credit for creating a spectacular public event. Yet as the 7,500 orange panels began to come down Monday, I couldn't help but wonder: Does public art now have to be bad to be effective, accepted, even loved? Because as art, the big-footed, 16-foot-tall "gates" - gallowslike frames hung with pleated fabric panels that arched over 23 miles of park walkways - defined banality.

Yet the $20 million installation inspired what amounted to a worldwide pilgrimage to see the latest creation by the world's most famous wrappers of buildings and girders of islands.

The Atkins Diet Opera
Link

Opening in Oxford on Friday, the production - which extols in rhyming couplets the virtues of avoiding carbohydrates - is one of the high-spots of an annual tour of Ig Nobel award-winners, given as ironic counters to Nobel prizes for those who carry out research 'that should never be repeated'.

The Smallest Studio with the Smartest Plan and the Biggest Library
Today's NYT tells the story of one of the only remaining independent film studios, Lions Gate, which released Fahrenheit 9/11 among others. It won't last forever, a likely takeover target. Note its place in box office and video charts below...[UPDATE: "independent" shouldn't be confused with "quality", I suppose, having read Ebert's defense of his 1-star review of Lion's Gate's Diary of a Mad Black Woman. He's being accused of not "getting it." It sounds like I probably wouldn't get it either.]

Weekend Box Office
1. The Pacifier
2. Be Cool
3. Hitch
4. Diary of a Mad Black Woman (Lion's Gate)
5. Million Dollar Baby

Weekend Video Rentals
1. Saw (Lion's Gate)
2. Taxi
3. Ray
4. The Notebook
5. I [Heart] Huckabees