When Rick Nielsen talks about his home town in northern Illinois, you might expect him to riff on one of his rock band’s hits. Maybe “I want you to want Rockford.” Or “Surrender, surrender . . . to Rockford.” The Cheap Trick guitarist and songwriter could even economize and simply invoke the group’s 2006 album, “ Rockford .” Read full article > >

Read the original:
Their Town: Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen rocks Rockford, Ill.

If it seems like Betty White is everywhere these days, that’s because she is. She started tweeting last month. She was roasted last week at the Friar’s Club in New York, where she was treated to a life-size cake in her image. And Thursday night, the 64-year showbiz veteran, former star of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Golden Girls,” was at Lisner Auditoruim to discuss her career and share recollections from her book, “ Betty & Friends: My Life at the Zoo ,” which came out this fall. ( White is at the National Zoo for a book signing Friday.) Read full article > >

See the rest here:
Betty White dishes on her career at Lisner Auditorium

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the New York Times restaurant review. We're honoring the art of criticism in a series on the subject. It took Jay Rayner around 700 words to lay waste to a Russian empire. In a blistering review of famed Moscow restaurateur Arkady Novikov's eponymous London outpost this past February, the Observer critic pronounced the establishment so “astoundingly grim you want to congratulate the kitchen on its incompetence” and compared its cuisine to cheap Chinese food. He was just getting warmed up. “And so my advice to you. Don't go to Novikov. Keep not going. Keep not going a lot,” Rayner wrote. “In a city with a talent for opening hateful and tasteless restaurants, Novikov marks a special new low. That's its real achievement.” Harsh words, but for a professional restaurant critic, this was par for the course. As with any creative medium, the culinary arts are subjected to critical judgments. With the good, comes the bad. Or in the case of Novikov, the “very, very bad.” While some readers might think restaurant critics write with sharp knives, a poison-dipped pen and a particular appetite for disdain, those in the field argue otherwise. Their mandate is to be objective, to give an honest appraisal of the restaurant to their readers. “You still have a basic job to do; you’ve got to get it right, and that’s what people expect,” says Rayner, whose eBook “My Dining Hell: Twenty Ways To Have a Lousy Night Out” will be released on June 1. And part of getting it right means occasionally dropping, what the restaurant industry calls, the “goose egg” – a zero-star review that in essence says, “Take your hard-earned money elsewhere.” “With the negative reviews, I once said they were like chest infections and car crashes – they were things that happened to me, not things I went out looking for,” says Rayner. Hanna Raskin, the restaurant critic for Seattle Weekly , also agrees critics do not go to a restaurant because they know it’s going to be abysmal. “Not only is the writing not fun, but the research isn’t fun either. We’re the ones that have to eat that bad food again and again and again.” But before pen is put to paper, critics must get to the marrow of the matter and decide if the lousy restaurant is even worth a review. With a new hot spot opening nearly every week in major metropolitan areas, it’d be an unfeasible – and stomach-straining – task to conquer them all. “I’ll review it if it’s a restaurant that people are serious about because of a prominent location or well-known chef or local restaurateur behind it. Basically, if it’s something that my readers really want to know about,” says John Kessler, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's dining critic . Raskin and Rayner also cite the prominence of the chef, location and media campaign. If the venue in question is a little mom and pop place, it’s simply not reasonable. “The times when I haven’t written about a restaurant at all is when I realize the restaurant is not one that deserves the attention of a national newspaper,” says Rayner. To put it in stateside perspective, he compares it to reviewing a dreadful restaurant in Boise, Idaho. If no one is planning to go or already going there, the review won’t be entertaining – or more importantly, serviceable to the reader. A large part of that entertainment value is drawn from how the reviewer crafts the language of “the slam.” That means letting people know how things taste and how much things cost; a full sense of the harrowing experience often with a side of relatively good-natured snark. “We don’t want to sound like the disgruntled Yelper,” says Kessler, who maintains he’s always a half a grade nicer in print than if he were talking to a friend. “You don’t want to sound offended or bent out of shape if the restaurant is bad. You want to be a nice person about it but you also want to go to town.” Raskin also says that, in her negative reviews, the reader should infer “that it was probably even worse.” Rayner, however, serves it in the raw: what he says in the review is what he thought. “The ability of people in the restaurant business to screw things up and find unique ways to screw things up never ceases to amaze me,” he says, adding he’s in the business of selling newspapers, not restaurants. Kessler admires this cultural candor. “The English people are great because they take such glee in their snarky locution. Americans will never do that. We just can’t. It’s not in our culture to be poetic a**holes.” But, U.K. critics aren’t the only one finding glee in negativity – the audience relishes it as well. Raskin says she actually gets more positive comments from readers when she prints negative reviews. “Almost every time I wrote something negative, I get the feedback, ‘I’m so glad you’re telling it like it is. I’m so glad you said that.’ And nobody ever says that when I write a good review,” she said. To this point, Rayner cites a Leo Tolstoy quote: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What makes that particular restaurant bad also makes it unique – and uniqueness makes a much more compelling story. There's also a touch of schadenfreude, or pleasure derived from others' misfortunes. “You start your Sunday morning reading a terrible review of somebody’s restaurant and as long as you’re not the chef’s mother, you’re probably going to feel slightly better for the rest of the day,” says Rayner, who at one point spoke with a clinical psychologist about readers’ penchant for social comparing. “I often say that my column is read for vicarious pleasure or brackish displeasure,” he adds. Yet, for every disparaging word written and read, these critics realize the pen is mightier than the fork. In 2003, master French chef Bernard Loiseau took his own life following a bad review of his restaurant, the Cote d'Or, by GaultMillau and reports that he would lose his third Michelin star – the highest rating a restaurant can attain by the Michelin Guide . While Loiseau already suffered from depression, some felt the reviews may have been his breaking point. In 2007, after former New York Times critic Frank Bruni awarded zero stars to restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow’s Kobe Club, Chodorow fired back. He ran a full-page ad in the Times attacking Bruni’s assessment , citing the review as a personal attack and questioning Bruni’s qualifications to be in the critic’s post. When Raskin was the food critic for the Dallas Observer, she said she received death threats. And Rayner has been invited outside for a go. “I think most critics realize it’s not just the chef or the owner you’re addressing here, but the careers of the cooks in the kitchen, the dishwashers and the servers all ultimately depend on what you say,” said Raskin. “We take this responsibility very seriously.” As journalists, they know how it feels to be subject to an outsider's opinion. “To be a writer is an act of great arrogance – to think that anybody would give a damn about what you have to say. You, therefore, have to take what anybody wants to say about you – and it’s not fun,” says Rayner. Ultimately, critics are paid for how they write, not how they eat – and for restaurants on the receiving end, that’s the bitter truth. Take Our Poll Do you have a favorite “bad” review? We'd love if you'd share it in the comments below. Previously – For restaurant reviewers, are health risks at critical mass? and Everyone's a critic, some just call it their day job

Read the original here:
Written in the stars: the art of the bad review

Trivia question: Name this forgotten man, the subject of Ross Melnick’s eye-poppingly informative new book, “ American Showman ”: He was the most creative and most popular independent exhibitor of silent films at a series of movie palaces (seating up to 6,000 people) in New York during the 1920s. Read full article > >

View post:
Book World: ‘American Showman’ by Ross Melnick

Severe flooding hits Brazil’s Amazon region, while the north-east of the country faces drought.

View original post here:
VIDEO: Brazil faces flooding and drought

“ What’s Going On ,” Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album, is a landmark. It was Motown’s first protest-music song cycle, as well as a template for the lusher, jazzier, more grown-up style that supplanted the label’s “Sound of Young America.” But even a landmark can be upstaged, which is what happened Thursday night at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, site of John Legend and the National Symphony Orchestra Pops’ “What’s Going On . . . Now.” Read full article > >

Read the original here:
‘What’s Going On’ tribute at Kennedy Center upstages Marvin Gaye’s landmark work

Angry over Amazon’s “showrooming.”

Read the original post:
Target to Stop Selling Kindles

More than 8,500 Brazilian troops are being deployed in a vast area of the Amazon to tackle drug trafficking, logging and illegal mining.

Here is the original post:
Brazil launches Amazon operation

Target has been trying to stop Amazon shoppers from checking products at Target stores and then buying them from Amazon.

Continued here:
Target, Upset With Amazon, Will Stop Selling Kindles

Carrie Underwood promised that her fourth album, “ Blown Away ,” would be “darker” than the country-pop sun rays she’s been known to radiate. False alarm. This is merely a trans-faux-mation — that thing pop stars do when they dabble in minor-key melodies, frowny lyrics and/or smoky eye shadow, hoping their listeners will mistake a superficial shift in tone for a meaningful artistic left turn. Read full article > >

Continued here:
Review: Carrie Underwood’s dark side gives way to the sunshine on ‘Blown Away’

Hundreds of indigenous Bolivians are on a second long march in protest at government plans to build a road through the Amazon rainforest.

See original here:
Bolivians march against road plan

D.J. Taylor , a British writer of formidable accomplishments — several well-received novels, as well as biographies of William Makepeace Thackeray and George Orwell — but little known in this country, has pulled off an impressive and wholly engaging feat in “ Derby Day .” Set in London and environs during a few weeks in the reign of Queen Victoria, it is not merely a work of historical fiction but one written in a language appropriate to its time — i.e., it is a Victorian novel, the prose of which brings to mind Thackeray (of course) and Dickens, yet never smacks of cuteness or contrivance. It is delicious fun and can be read purely as such, yet it is also a serious novel about a society caught between the familiar and the new, in which “the world is changing” and leaving many people behind. Read full article > >

The rest is here:
“Derby Day” by D.J. Taylor

To my mind, the highest form of mystery novel is the “locked room” murder or “impossible crime.” While Agatha Christie is the mistress of misdirection with an unequaled gift for plotting, John Dickson Carr remains the master of those howdunits involving what is sometimes facetiously referred to as a “hermetically sealed chamber.” For example, in Carr’s masterpiece, “ The Three Coffins ,” two murders are committed by seemingly supernatural means. In one, a man is shot at point-blank range while standing in a courtyard covered with freshly fallen snow. His are the only tracks in the snow. Moreover, there are eyewitnesses who can swear that they saw no one near the victim at the time of the shot and that it wasn’t suicide. How was he killed? Read full article > >

View original post here:
Michael Dirda reviews Christopher Fowler’s ‘The Memory of Blood’

Brazil’s Congress delays a final vote on controversial changes to the country’s forest code which enviromentalists say will spur Amazon deforestation.

Link:
Brazil delays key forest law vote

Graham Swift’s previous novel, “Tomorrow” (2007), was such a fiasco that a grim kind of suspense built up around his new book. Would “ Wish You Were Here ” inspire another round of jeering on both sides of the Atlantic? Read full article > >

Read more from the original source:
Book review: Graham Swift’s “Wish You Were Here,” reviewed by Ron Charles