The Art Assignment

The Art Assignment is on permanent hiatus, but the existing videos are a great explanation of different art movements and artists with a focus on modern art, as the host is a curator of modern art. In this video she explores Yoko Ono. If you’ve only ever heard about Yoko Ono as the punch line in a joke about the Beatles, it’s worth taking the time to explore her work as an artist in her own right.

I watch nineties television so you don't have to

My friends and I watched The Crow (1994) this weekend. There is the horrible tragedy of it all, but—that movie. Is the most nineties. Dear lord. It’s so nineties. I also just want to roll around in the aesthetic of it.

Lucky (?) for me—there are three sequels and a TV show. The show, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, is currently available to stream on NBC.com, so guess what I’ve been watching.

The show aired for one season from 1998-99, with Mark Dacascos as Eric Draven, the character Brandon Lee played in the original. And basically, they turned it into a bog standard nineties superhero show. The episodes could have been written for Sentinel or Pretender or Highlander—they barely are altered by being about The Crow. This means they made a series of absolutely baffling choices:

( Where this got long and also contains spoilers for a 20 year old show and a 27 (!) year old movie )

I’m only 6 episodes in, and I know that this series ends on a cliffhanger, but oh man, it is such peak nineties television. The sad thing is I know that The Crow has had a huge and obsessive fandom over the years, but not anywhere I can find, and certainly not on AO3.