Michael Long is a writer and cultural commentator. He contributed essays and reviews to The Weekly Standard between 2000 and 2002, covering topics in popular culture, media, and literature, with pieces examining cartoons, television, novels, and the cultural legacy of the 1960s.
THERE IS ONLY ONE GOOD REASON to hate Christmas music: treacle--the cloying sentimentality, molasses emotionalism, and gooey, faux-compassion. Easter songs are silly: Peter Cottontail comes hoppin' down the bunny trail, and ladies don Easter bonnets. The New Year's song "Auld Lang Syne" has license…
THE DISSONANCE OF A JOHN IRVING NOVEL—the typically staid John Irving prose used to express the typically steamy John Irving topics—can be overwhelming. It’s like listening to a schoolmarm reading aloud the letters to Penthouse. Irving’s novels are a parade of cross-dressers, kink freaks,…
Put the guys in tweed jackets from the National Endowment for the Arts, the men in sharkskin suits from the main offices of the record business, and a bunch of cardigan-wearing textbook writers in a room together, and what do you get? The answer is a new "educational resource," the recently…
One hesitates to burden entertainment with philosophical baggage. The great majority of moviegoers are wisely after the mindless pleasure of the thing. They don't want Kierkegaard's Either/Or. They want respite from worry, work, and the occasional screaming kid.
One hesitates to burden entertainment with philosophical baggage. The great majority of moviegoers are wisely after the mindless pleasure of the thing. They don't want Kierkegaard's Either/Or. They want respite from worry, work, and the occasional screaming kid. Yet some books and movies don't make…
Pop music has given us talented stylists and praiseworthy songwriters -- but only one artist. No one matters but Bob Dylan. He emerged in the early 1960s with a voice as authentic as the genres he seemed to have created. He did nothing less than upend the cultural landscape. He redefined the method…
Pop music has given us talented stylists and praiseworthy songwriters -- but only one artist. No one matters but Bob Dylan. He emerged in the early 1960s with a voice as authentic as the genres he seemed to have created. He did nothing less than upend the cultural landscape. He redefined the method…
Pop music has given us talented stylists and praiseworthy songwriters -- but only one artist. No one matters but Bob Dylan. He emerged in the early 1960s with a voice as authentic as the genres he seemed to have created. He did nothing less than upend the cultural landscape. He redefined the method…
The thing that drives so many creative types batty is not their own lack of success but the caprice of success. Great actors spellbind in regional theater while selling ties at Macy's to pay the rent; lousy actors sign eight-figure deals to say the F-word in front of a movie camera. It's when the…