Tuesday, May 5 2009
The Geeks Have Inherited the Earth -– and They Rule It
Geek humor is rooted in a commanding pop cultural and scientific literacy and deployed with a sense of casual authority which one ... must ... obey.
Monday, May 4 2009
Fighting the Flu
The mobilization of the military to control the spread of the current outbreak of a rare strain of the swine flu in Mexico City is right out of Stephen King’s The Stand.
Tuesday, April 28 2009
‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’: Check, Please
I hate it when a film takes a brilliant literary work and turns it into what it thinks the literary work should be.
Friday, April 24 2009
Sherlock Holmes and the Shanghai Gesture
“We have become archetypes,” laments Holmes to Watson, “we were created and published before the year 1923, which places us and many of our adventures into the realm of public domain.”
Thursday, April 2 2009
Far Cry 2: The Heart of Darkness Game
This is a game that is incessantly hostile. It is constantly pushing the player to become more efficient at destruction.
Wednesday, April 1 2009
The Jester in the Fisherman
Lines tangled and broke, feet tripped and slipped, rods and tempers snapped, and sometimes, even anglers fell overboard. It wasn’t funny … unless you were sober.
Tuesday, March 31 2009
Chok(ing) Onscreen and In Print
Whether served up on the page or on the screen, this is an intimate assessment of a twisted mother/son relationship with plenty of sardonic humor and scathing satire.
Monday, March 30 2009
Time for a Repress: ‘The Gilded Palace of Sin’
For people lucky enough to stumble upon the Flying Burrito Brothers, they made country cool. The music's simplicity and emotive directness, often derided and mocked by hipsters, could now be valid, vital and mean something to a modern audience.
Friday, March 27 2009
Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity
In a sense, panic is an imprecise word to describe the emotion of financial crashes; paranoia better suits.
Friday, March 20 2009
Little Murders: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
This is not Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation but, rather, Hunter S. Thompson’s Generation of Swine, the urban home front during the waning days of World War II, gritty and unvarnished, and chillingly reflective of modern sociology.
Tuesday, March 10 2009
Don’t Touch that Dial
If Congress had its way, Dorothy would have clicked her ruby slippers together and chanted, “There’s no place like home theater. There’s no place like home theater.”
Monday, March 2 2009
Woolf at the Door
Both Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham's The Hours offer an illuminating look at the choices we make, the roles we play, and the hours that hinge our lives together.
Friday, February 27 2009
Herb Kent: Another Reason Why Black History Month is Still Relevant
Throughout the late ‘50s and ‘60s, every city with a significant black population turned to a black-formatted radio station for the hottest sounds and pulse of the street.
Thursday, February 26 2009
Blind Man with a Pistol: Ishmael Reed’s Misguided Pow-Wow
Anyone who has witnessed affirmative action policies in play can tell you that bad apples are chosen to fulfill a quota, not unlike a cop who harasses every citizen who bears a vague resemblance to a wanted suspect.
Friday, February 6 2009
Conversing with Rudy Wurlitzer: ‘A Beaten-up Old Scribbler’
My conversations with Rudy Wurlitzer were not unlike a road journey itself with plenty of unplanned side trips along the way.
Friday, January 30 2009
Art Imitates Death
One of the misconceptions that Graeme Thomson deals with in his book I Shot a Man in Reno is that music about death is somehow out of the norm. In fact, death finds its way into pretty much every type of music.
Tuesday, January 27 2009
Where the Frak is All My Money?
Battlestar Galactica is like Wall Street—it’s hard to tell Cylons from humans, especially when it comes to galaxy-size Ponzi schemes.
Friday, January 16 2009
Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Eloquence of Rioters
This poetry, symbolically violent in its choice of literary form and symbolically subversive in its choice of Creole, reveals the literacy of rioters.
Thursday, January 8 2009
Bret Hart: A Real Life in a Cartoon World
In a surreal world dedicated to a uniquely haphazard and comically inept breed of pretense, Bret Hart’s appeal was simple: he made everything seem 'real'.
Twilight Takeover
The film is a successful adaptation of the book not only because Pattinson is so talented and dreamy, but also because Hardwicke knows a thing or two about filming adolescents.
