Politicos and media experts of various stripes and credibility have predictably implicated violent video games in the Sandy Hook tragedy. In fact, it’s far from clear what, if indeed any role violent games, TV, or movies have played in the wave of public massacres besetting America – including the Sandy Hook slaughter. A complex cybernetic […]
“Slacker,” director Richard Linklater’s 1991 debut feature,unfolded a daisy-chain of Austin bohemian mavericks, and otherwise gonzo 20-somethings, weaving in and out of one another’s lives in a surreal roundelay. Their means of support were uncertain and minimal. Many were former University of Texas students and expressed vague anarchistic or new-age metaphysical beliefs. But they were […]
Taking it off, taking it all off, whether for eros, profit, art, or any combination thereof might just be the world’s fourth oldest profession. Throughout history in song and story, it’s usually an infernal female who works her wiles upon some hapless male, by shedding her duds. To the West, Salome is arguably the most famous belly […]
Film scholars have commented upon the native power of the documentary medium to convey the impression of unmanipulated reality. The intimation of “truthiness”– Stephen Colbert’s delectable mot– becomes especially pernicious in what I’ll call the “ill-intentioned” documentary. In this thankfully rare subgenre, the maker’s attitude toward some painful psychosocial problem is subverted by the very images […]
The history of high art abounds with towering work left incomplete. Throughout the ages, death is obviously the most common cause of unfinished masterpieces, from Virgil’s “Aeneid” to Bach’s “Art of Fugue,” from Gaudi’s “Cathedral of the Holy Family” to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon.” Failed or withheld financial support comes next. Last is the […]
Aaron Sorkin’s Oscar-winning screenplay for “The Social Network“ featured a collection of duplicitous wonks backstabbing their way to the top of the Internet heap. (A more accurate, if less artful, title would have been “The Unsocialized Network.”) Sorkin’s script was blessedly free of the cumbersome liberal pieties – and I write as an impious liberal – […]
“Sugar man, won’t you hurry ’Cause I’m tired of these scenes For a blue coin, won’t you bring back All those colors of my dreams…” –Sugar Man, from the album “Cold Fact” Going back to the Ragtime era, every great American city – and cities like London, Paris, and Berlin – had popular music clubs, […]
Three years of high school Latin has left me with an enduring fondness for the language and its pithy sayings. I remain eccentrically pleasured by Latin phrases that crop up in academic writing: e.g. (exempli gratia – for example); inter alia (among other things); vide supra (see above); vide infra (see below); and pace this […]
Read my latest The Media on My Mind column: Dr. Johnson famously proclaimed to his biographer, Samuel Boswell: “Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” In the early 1970s, I visited London for the first time. After a week […]
My latest installment of The Media on My Mind: In the early 1970s, a couple who had been together 20 years consulted with me after the husband insisted his wife read Nena and George O’Neill’s “Open Marriage: A New Life Style for Couples” (New York: M. Evans & Co., 1972)… Click here to read the […]