It was pretty clear that Buttholes v Touch and Go was never going to end up anywhere close the Supreme Court. As much as what they did was ethically questionable, the law was pretty clearly on the Butthole's side, and T&G threw a hail mary. Dislike T&G all you want, but making it sound like they were trying to destroy…

'Forcing a generation of sprightly nerds registered in Introduction to
Medieval Studies to unlearn what Tolkien's fiction taught them was hard
enough'

Well, your last sentence is key, and it's pretty much the faultline for this dispute. One of the things that made 80s indie music perhaps the most fertile creative period in American music was the sense of community and aspirations to the collective betterment of everyone. The Buttholes certainly weren't the only, the…

'setting a legal precedent for 320 million Americans to abide by for effectively all future dealings?'

I think the violation of the community standard is far more offensive; T&G sunk a lot of (apparently unrecouped) money into the Buttholes in their formative years, and there's no evidence that the label wasn't promoting their catalog (indeed, that's a ridiculous charge) or that they were stiffing the Buttholes on…

Yeah, I still like it because the cast can overcome weak material, and because they've created a stable of characters who still have a lot of comic mileage left, but I agree that the plotting so far seems really sitcommy. Although I actually think the show started to go off track when Selina became president about two…

I disagree. Veep is not a show that requires any 'shipping'.

Agreed on both counts.

This is wildly overstated. Looking at indie labels as merely capitalist enterprises fails to acknowledge the cultural work they do in helping bands reach wider audiences, a role still necessary today. And no one reflexively 'rallies around the poor little label': nobody thinks the Meat Puppets or Dinosaur Jr are…

Also, peak Julie Bowen on Ed. Slattery's had a charmed career.

Great article. I lost a lot of respect for the BH Surfers after 'Pepper', and a lot more after they sued Touch & Go.

Except for the Mareen/Dany plots, the pacing seems quicker, at least compared to last season where there seemed to be dragging things out. Overall an improvement so far.

I admire Fiennes for doing Coriolanus but I wasn't a big fan of the adaptation. He removed too much of the political context (how do you do Coriolanus without Menenius' Fable of the belly?) and a few questionable choices (Menenius kills himself???) mar it, but it looks great, Vanessa Redgrave should play all the…

I think that's how Shakespeare should be taught in high school.

Early modern were reading plays as well as watching them. (As Shakespeare once wrote, 'It can be two things.') Indeed Shakespeare may have revised some of his plays for print (Q2 Hamlet is the strongest potential example of this.) An app like this, which seems to mediate the performed and printed texts, isn't a bad…

'Buy a decent scholarly edition with serviceable footnotes. The Pelican edition is good, Oxford is better.'

I'm invoking Poe's Law here. I think this might be a parody of Berniebros, but I'm not certain, and it's impossible to tell.

I've always believed this, seriously.

I'll speculate that part of Hudson's career problems stem from talk that her performance in Almost Famous had more to do with the editing bay then her performance. I doubt that's fair, but it might indicate why she didn't get better roles in the years following.

I dunno; I had a dude lecture me in the 1990s about how I wouldn't get Merzbow and thus should stick to mainstream stuff like Front 242. There's always been an element of hipsterism to Merzbow fandom (and I'm not trying to imply anything about their 'musical' merits.) 'Hipsters' are, were, and always will be with us.