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, […]
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 […]
Read the latest installment of The Media on My Mind, Adventures in Pop Culture: The Letter Killeth, at Clinical Psychiatry News. Here’s a sample: It’s been said that academic rivalry is so vicious because the stakes are so small. For instance, psychoanalytic film theory occupies a tiny niche of a tiny niche of analytic and […]
Read my column on Clinical Psychiatry News, The Media on My Mind: On-Screen ‘Hunger Games’ Found Wanting. Here’s an excerpt: Philosophers since Plato have portrayed utopias – earthly paradises crafted and led by the best of the best. Science fiction mainly favors dystopian hells over utopian heavens. In story or film, dystopian futures may be […]
My April column for Clinical Psychiatry News is up. Read it here: “The Media on My Mind: The Housewives of Beverly Hills (Part 2)” My last column traced the history of soap opera, from its origins in depression-era radio to its reinvention as a lucrative pop culture phenomenon on daytime network TV. By the 1990s, […]
My March column for Clinical Psychiatry News is now online. Read it here: “The Media on My Mind: The Housewives of Beverly Hills (Part 1)” I propose to interpret Housewives as a reinvention of the dolorous domains of past radio and TV soap opera, for these fame- and celebrity-obsessed times… [more]