December is here and seasonal music fills the air with almost disconcerting ubiquity. So, with songwriters happily napping with visions of royalty checks dancing in their heads, last week performing rights organization ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) announced its Top 25 most-performed Holiday songs for the …

It’s all relative isn’t it? To the world’s poorest citizens living lives on the bleakest edge of subsistence, the lives of America’s most disaffected homeless might seem regal; and the ladder rises to the working poor, middle class, upper middle class, and affluent. We looked at a marketing research company …

Winter Holiday/Christmas programming has become a month-long proposition, kicking in right after Thanksgiving. ABC Family (“25 Days of Christmas“), Lifetime, Hallmark, TV Land (see Sunday, the 11th) and Cartoon Network are especially milking the season of Good Cheer for all its worth. The following is an attempt at something approaching …

Can you imagine listening only to the Academy Awards show? The seeing is almost everything: the intense concentration of the beautiful, famous and talented maneuvering around in their finery is the show’s single greatest appeal. “All Access at the Academy Awards: Photographs by Art Streiber,” a new exhibition featuring 120 …

If Tom Cruise gets any weirder, he may turn into Michael Jackson. In an interview taped October 30 that aired Tuesday on Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2005, the movie star, Scientologist, scourge of the medicated multitudes, and theoretical impregnator of his fiancee Katy Holmes, said, …

Michael Jackson couldn’t stand the heat and so he went some place hotter: Bahrain. After he was found not guilty of child abuse and conspiracy charges in June, Jackson left his Neverland home in Santa Barbara County and went on a little jaunt to the Middle East with the three …

Where do America’s favorite celebutants go when their messy complications become too much even for the Fox Network? They go to E!, of course. While Fox tends to specialize in the sensational and tawdry, many of its shows have been known to exhibit other qualities, while if you take the …

Blogcritics.org has partnered with Shaun OMac Daily’s popular weekly web radio show SUBJECT2DISCUSSION, which airs Tuesday nights at 7 pm PT, 10 pm ET on the LV Rocks site, for a weekly pop culture report on the show from 8-8:30 PT. Shaun was kind enough to announce to the world, …

With Thanksgiving gone it’s the holiday decorating season again, although in our neighborhood some houses have had the industrial-strength lighting and filigree up since the weekend before Thanksgiving – freaks! We were out of town for the Thanksgiving weekend so our festive 3-D tributes to winter, Santa Claus (forgoing the …

Last week I heard prognosticators opine that the opening blast of the holiday shopping season has shifted from the traditional brick-and-mortar Black Friday to Cyber Monday for online retailers, because so many online shoppers, who tend to be younger, use their work computers to make their cyber-purchases, and people don’t …