Brideshead Revisited: The Movie. Mostly it condenses the right things. I'm ashamed to say where it goes wrong. it's that Sebastian Flyte is too gay from the beginning. He's too effeminite, too much an accumulation of all the stereotypes of the day and today. Considering that Charles eventually falls in love with his sister-he's mostly straight--this is a fatal mistake. Sebastian must intrigue and seduce Charles Ryder. You have to believe that Charles becomes fascinated by Sebastian and then, like a lottery winner, discovers he is connected to wealth and power and hereditory freedom. But the movie, in making Sebastian a problem so quickly, turns Charles into a bigger sort of predator. He indulges Sebastian and then, boom, he sees it in. The joy of the miniseries and the novel is to see a straight guy fascinated by another man for a sustained period before the bling comes out.

The end of the G-A-Y - Times Online

My second time to G-A-Y, which was my first time smelling poppers, I was wearing a lumberjack shirt. Declasse, I know. But it was one of three shirts I had packed to go to India. I had only hiking boots and sandals. I'm in this gorgeous ensemble in the cocktail lounge and a local comes up to me and asks, "Are you from Canada?" I answer yes, assuming he's a mind reader. He asks his next question, "And do you all dress like that?" and I realized he was just being a bitch.

Previous generations of gay men identified with Dorothy the escapist or Judy the victim. But anyone who grew up in the 80s or with 80s reruns wanted to be Sophia, who never missed an opportunity to be a bitch. But not a Bette Davis bitch. An old, scattered-brained bitch who is essentially harmless, tolerated because of her seniority.

Golden Girl Estelle Getty Dead at 84 - E! Online

It's nice to know that there's one publishing company still around that likes to spend money.

Can Si Newhouse Keep Condé Nast’s Gloss Going? - Biography - NYTimes.com

Australia usually produces bands with short shelf lives. For every INXS and Silverchair, there's a few Eurogliders. The country never seemed to get over the parochial hump, with all its thrashing around chasing the next big sound, that Canada did when it gave birth to Jane Siberry who begot Sarah McLachlan, who begot Nelly Furtado and so on. I don't know whether Cut Copy has any legs, but I'm prepared to wring as much pleasure out of the single "Hearts on Fire" as I can. It packs so much '80s/early '90s into a few minutes--Echo and the Bunnyman vocals, Depeche Mode electronics, New Order guitars, Duran Duran-in-Rio saxophones, Black Box whoop-samples--it negates the interceding decades. But it's cheerful. Go figure.

All the buzz about the Obama-as-terrorist New Yorker cover hasn't quite lured me to read the article. It's huge.

Entertainment Weekly, always a candied popcorn kind of magazine that provided the best 45-minute read of the week, has tossed away its colourful palette for a Time magazine dowdiness. Even the photos seem stripped of vitality. The worst new feature by far is the random bolding that seems intent on replacing pullquotes. They don't. It's not like it's The Atlantic, for God's sake.

The thing about the Andrew Coyne's Maclean's cover story urging Canadians to adopt a law on abortion--because that would be the end result of his demand that we have a debate on it--is that it presumes that no Criminal Code law on abortion equals no policy. But health services are provincial in this country, hospitals and clinics have their own policy. If we are decentralized on so much of how health care is delivered in this country, why single out abortion as something that needs to be standardized?