Slate’s Culture Gabfest on the Canadian sci-fi series Orphan Black, Hateship Loveship, and the revised edition of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love.

Is It OK to Hate Celine Dion?

Is It OK to Hate Celine Dion?

Slate's weekly roundtable.
May 7 2014 11:54 AM

The Culture Gabfest “Live from Montreal” Edition

Slate’s Culture Gabfest on Orphan Black, Hateship Loveship, and Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love.

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On this week’s episode, live from the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal, the critics discuss the Canadian sci-fi series Orphan Black, which stars Tatiana Maslany as several identical women who are revealed to be clones. Maslany slips deftly into each role, but does the show’s writing stand up to her virtuosic performance? Next, the gabbers turn to Hateship Loveship, a film adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” starring Kristen Wiig in a surprising dramatic turn. And finally, the Gabfest welcomes Slate music critic (and native Canadian) Carl Wilson to discuss the revised edition of his book Let’s Talk About Love, which reconsiders the role of “good taste” in pop music criticism. What’s a critic to do when kitsch is cool and cool is kitschy?

Links to some of the things we discussed this week follow:

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Dana: The Angolan novelist Ondjaki, whose books Good Morning Comrades and Granma Nineteen and Soviet’s Secret she picked up at the Blue Met festival.

Julia: Norman McLaren, the grandfather of Canadian animation, whose mesmerizing short film “Horizontal Lines” is available on YouTube.

Carl: Owen Pallett, formerly known as Final Fantasy, whose new album “In Conflict” is his most emotionally frank.

Steve: Canadian political philosophers C.B. Macpherson and G.A. Cohen. In particular, Macpherson’s revelatory The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke.  

Outro: “Montreal” by the Wingdale Community Singers

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Andy Bowers and Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Anna Shechtman.

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Stephen Metcalf is Slate’s critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s.

Dana Stevens is Slate’s movie critic.

Julia Turner, the former editor in chief of Slate, is a regular on Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast.