The book fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie.

Ugh. Skip it. And is it just me, or does anyone else find those Colbert interview segments less than useless? Neither the Woz segment nor the Dawkins segment was worth the time.

% Night comes around, and the kids sit around the fire.

Terri: I'm so hungry I could eat at Arby's!
Lisa: Oh my gosh!
Nelson: That *is* hungry.
Lisa: *Really* hungry...

-- "Das Bus"

Next you'll find Dawkins guesting on an episode of South Park.

Now as a special treat courtesy of our friends at the Meat Council, please help yourself to this tripe.

Rod: "But who brings baby storks?
Ned: There's no such thing as storks! It's all God!

...

"Tim, this controversy _could_ put more meat in the seats."
Lovejoy: "I'll be a white Al Sharpton!"

The God Delusion, By Richard Dawkins

The film will carry you deep inside Mr. Gould’s musical mind: an awesome place to be, and not always a comfortable one.

"I detest audiences. Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences. I think they are a force of evil."

See also:

DANTE: You hate people.
RANDAL: But I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic?

Back to the new Gould film:

The most astonishing moment comes when Mr. Gould fluently wends his way through the climactic section of the unfinished final fugue from Bach’s “Art of Fugue,” spouting thematic analysis and quoting Albert Schweitzer as he goes.

Now reread the beginning of Gödel, Escher, Bach.

To give an idea of how extraordinary a six-part fugue is, in the entire Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, containing forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, only two have as many as five parts, and nowhere is there a six-part fugue! One could probably liken the task of improvising a six-part fugue to the playing of sixty simultaneous games of chess, and winning them all. To improvise an eight-part fugue is really beyond human capability.

...

The six-part fugue [in the Musical Offering] is one of Bach's most complex creations, and its theme is, of course, the Royal Theme. ... To write a decent fugue of even two voices based on it would not be easy for the average musician!

...

All in all, the Musical Offering represents one of Bach's supreme accomplishments in counterpoint. It is itself one large intellectual fugue, in which many ideas and forms have been woven together, and in which playful double meanings and subtle allusions are commonplace. And it is a very beautiful creation of the human intellect which we can appreciate forever.

Glenn Gould Films - Report

We think we know books, and the imposing entrance of the New York Public Library reminds us of their weighty and solemn importance. In the great traditions of the West, the book is a foundation upon which mighty edifices of knowledge are constructed. But if you pass through the lobby to the library’s main exhibition hall and gallery, something else is revealed.

They aspire not to disclose the timeless, but to discern the transient, to clasp the texture of experience — a passing moment, an instant’s glimpse, a sensation as compressed and meticulously evoked as a haiku.

In so many of the ehon, when the evanescent is carefully contemplated, something timeless is revealed.

Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan

About 20 percent of the audience of “Lost” has gone missing since last year, even though the show has suffered no discernible decline in quality.

Idiosyncratic and Personal, PC Edges TV

Even at Lynch's most fractured, in films like "Lost Highway," there's a sense that if you could somehow reach bottom, you'd find truth, some primal series of events that kaleidoscoped out of recognition in the telling. There's no bottom to "Inland Empire," at least not one that we discern after one viewing.

See also:

"Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit."

'Inland Empire' | The IFC Blog

Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is a fascinating piece of Cuisinart filmmaking that brings together all the leading elements of gangster films in this young century.

The plot is so ingenious that one wonders why it took more than seven decades of crime movies for someone to come up with it.

Vera Farmiga is excellent in a secondary role in this film.

The Departed | At the Movies

Some of the most celebrated images of nineteenth-century American photography emerged from government-sponsored geological surveys whose purpose was to study and document western territories.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan and William Bell, two survey photographers who joined expeditions in the 1860s and 1870s, opened the eyes of nineteenth-century Americans to the western frontier. Highlighting a recent Smart Museum of Art acquisition, One/Many brings together an exquisite group of photographs by Bell and O’Sullivan.

Particularly noteworthy are their photographic panoramas, assemblages of individual images joined together to form a continuous, horizontal landscape view. These panoramas have not been exhibited in well over a century and have never before been published.

One/Many: Western American Survey Photographs

“People were constantly asking for my advice: ‘Tell me what five albums I should buy now,’ or ‘Tell me what are the five best heavy metal albums of all time,’ ” Mr. Scaruffi said. “Eventually you get tired of answering the same question, and you prepare a list. Then the list becomes many lists.”

“Probably my biggest ambition would be to write a history of knowledge,” he said. “Something that packages all of my interests together: literature, science, philosophy, politics — whatever.”

The Greatest Web Site of All Time

AFTER making a pair of successful documentaries about grunge rock (“Hype”) and hip-hop D.J.’s (“Scratch”), Doug Pray was approached to direct a movie about yet another subculture: graffiti artists. He wasn’t interested.

Then he met one.

Graffiti Cinema Turns Moody

For those of us raised on beat-heavy pop, rhythm and blues, and rock, Mr. Reich’s infectiously rhythmic music was a path into “serious music,” a realm that might have once felt closed. Among Mr. Reich’s legions of fans must be many a rock, funk or hard-core devotee who came upon works like “Drumming,” or “Music for 18 Musicians” — two of his best known and most hypnotic percussion epics — and found themselves somehow changed.

Steve Reich’s Fascinating Rhythm