Friday, October 21 2011
The World’s Favourite Parlour Game: The Quite Interesting Brilliance of ‘QI’
We rarely equate television game shows with admirable life philosophies, but the BBC's QI with host Stephen Fry pulls it off by making us think as well as laugh.
Thursday, October 20 2011
Geniuses Are People, Too
Creative geniuses don’t succeed despite their flaws, they succeed because they are flawed.
Tuesday, October 18 2011
Pavement Art: When Destruction Is as Important as Creation
While some celebrate art through its destruction, we can ponder the impetus to buy, sell, own and store art away.
Wednesday, October 12 2011
Mohawks and Korans: Taqwacores Punk Mash-up
The Taqwacore movement seizes space in the punk narrative and social fabric, which allows Muslim voices to take root and explore their own version of rebellion.
Friday, September 30 2011
Chuck Eddy Will Piss You Off with ‘Rock and Roll Always Forgets’
Buy this infuriating and brilliant book. But get it in softcover. You'll be throwing it against your wall.
Friday, September 16 2011
Epistolary Rex, The Sharp Hunger for Letters: Conversations with Peter Case
A poetic series of ruminations between a journalist and his subject, a folk-hero rebel rocker, who celebrate years of friendship by exploring the rocky, jolting, and quasi-spiritual experiences that shaped both of their lives.
Tuesday, September 13 2011
Transforming the Metamorphosis
While Atanes's film comes across as somber and unintentionally funny, and the Capaldi film is bizarre and outright amusing. Both do a brilliant job of capturing the surreal, dark mood that The Metamorphosis is cocooned in.
Monday, September 12 2011
We Piss Anywhere: ‘Sympathy for Mick Jagger’
Mick Jagger is the devil; the avatar for the swaggering, fatally self-assured hedonist who will piss anywhere with a cocky smirk written all over his face that only confirms there is nothing you can do to stop him.
Friday, September 9 2011
Connect the Dots: Transgender Narratives in Pop Culture
Transgender representation in modern film, television, and literature blurs the lines of gender, class, race and sexuality, which is precisely why trans narratives are still considered dangerous.
Thursday, September 8 2011
Trickster-Heroes in ‘Buffy’ and ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’
While Spike represents a moral alternative to Buffy’s heroism, the Arthurian Green Knight's tricks -- including a gruesome beheading -- end as mere a parlor game. Spike is the superior trickster.
Friday, August 12 2011
‘Red Shambhala’: Telepathy, Mental Powers, Electronic Surveillance & Mysticism in the U.S.S.R.
While the practical experiments of laboratories bent on superhuman creations failed as surely as did the subversive aims to spark revolt on the Mongol plains or in the Tibetan monasteries, the lesson of this unbelievable plot lingers in this thoughtful, instructive, and sad testament of grand hopes and puny fates.
Monday, August 8 2011
Steve Earle’s ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’
A been-there-lived-it-attitude and street-level redemption, all propelled by a songwriter's/storyteller's lyrical and narrative knack.
Friday, August 5 2011
‘Shock Value’: What Men (and Boys) Really Fear
Jason Zinoman argues that the fantastic, Gothic monsters of the first half of the 20th century were replaced by a New Horror -- the monster right in front of your face.
Monday, July 25 2011
Frustrated Fantasies: Misperceptions of Fandom and ‘Gone With the Wind’
The value of fandom is often underestimated. Rather than the stereotyped burnt-out housewives or socially inept teenagers that obsessively and indiscriminately consume popular culture, fans are active agents.
Friday, July 22 2011
No One Is Untouchable: Not Federico Garcia Lorca, Not Ai Weiwei
Governments tend to take on their worst form, to devolve to their most horrific manifestation, when they kill artists. Artists look out into the horrors of the world, and inevitably, the horrors sometimes reach back.
Monday, July 18 2011
The Hate for Southern Hip-Hop: Why So Serious?
The way some of us disparage Southern rap, you'd think rappers like Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame had recorded a record dissing Kool G. Rap and Big Daddy Kane.
Tuesday, July 5 2011
‘Norwegian Wood’ Is Pretty Onscreen, But Puzzling
Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood has been referred to as the "Japanese Catcher in the Rye", but J. D. Salinger said that his book was not actable and he would never sell the rights to Hollywood. Maybe Murakami should have listened to Salinger.
Friday, July 1 2011
Enmeshed In Modernity: Malcolm Turvey’s ‘The Filming of Modern Life’
Most of these films have been studied to death, then autopsied, buried, exhumed, and autopsied again, but Malcolm Turvey unearths some fresh perspectives and in the process, provides a nice corrective to long-misguided notions.
Wednesday, June 29 2011
Tommy McKearney’s ‘The Provisional IRA Is an Insider’s Analysis of the Dream and the Reality
A contemporary analysis of the main IRA force in its 40 years "from insurrection to parliament", from a participant not in a seminar but a cell, as an operative and not as a professor, a volunteer and a leader of the IRA -- not a reporter.
Thursday, June 23 2011
Dylan As Text, Sub-Text, Ur-Text in ‘Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown’
This is Bob Dylan as shifting text, not just layered like pages, back or front, or over-laid like a palimpsest, but cross-wise and motile as a termite.
