Comment On Music Review: Brooklyn Philharmonic Sets Out On Ambitious New Programs

Canadian artist Howie Tsui redesigned a pinball machine to turn it into a crude simulation of a musket-ball rattling around a soldier's guts for a War of 1812-themed exhibition currently running at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queens University in Kingston. It's meant to demonstrate the way that repetition and concentration can inure you to the horrors of war: The first part of his exhibition is a re-themed pinball machine, which now, having been Tsui-ed, is called Musketball! Tsui repainted the front glass panel and it now shows a British soldier reeling back as his guts explode from a musket shot (no rolling around inside for this one). The playing surface is painted with organs, tissue and bone, with the words “mangled viscera” at midfield. It would all be tame in a modern shooter video game, but it’s shockingly graphic on a vintage board. I step up to the game and fire my first ball, which gets back in the gutter faster than I thought possible. I fire the second ball — which I note are gold, not silver, to which Tsui says, “I kind of blinged it up a little bit.” This ball stays in play just long enough to hit a few bumpers and set off sound effects of rifle shots and artillery blasts. I fire my remaining three balls, and my final score is slightly less than one-tenth of Tsui’s high score. “It’s your first time playing. I had to do a lot of testing,” Tsui says, showing he’s also talented in the art of diplomacy. “After a while,” he says, “you sort of get hooked on the game, and the whole idea for me is that it distances the player from the idea of violence.” Pinball, bones and animal skins: Howie Tsui’s wonderful horrors of the War of 1812 [Peter Simpson/Ottawa Citizen] (via Kadrey)     

Amanda Bynes is not happy. We know, because she indicated as much in a lengthy tweet. Her ire is directed this time at In Touch Weekly, which, the actress claims, used

Advance Review: If I can find one good thing to say about NBC's new shuffled-to-summer comedy, Save Me, it's that it's under-promoted. No, the hype machine was definitely not cooking its gears overtime to draw awareness to what, I'm arrogantly presuming the network itself thinks, is a rock bottom offering. Save Me is laugh-free. Which, one would think, is an obstacle for a fledgling comedy. But the thinking here must be, much like other uninspired new-wave single-camera comedies, that only a logline, a narrator and a bunch of people talking fast in place of actual funny lines is needed. In fact, Anne Heche's crazed, hyper performance as "back from the brink of death" Beth will have you wishing that miracles worked in reverse. Continue reading…

Infinity Ward has confirmed that Call of Duty: Ghosts is coming to PlayStation 4. While the title was originally announced for “next-generation platforms,” Activision had not explicitly announced it for Sony’s console until this afternoon. In a post on Twitter, Infinity Ward confirmed releases on both PS3 and PS4, and Activision community manager Dan Amrich has since followed up with a post on his blog, One of Swords. Continue reading…

Halo gets a TV show, Wonder Woman might, and Zombieland doesn't! And Sylvester Stallone drops some Expendables 3 casting hints.