Monday, July 20 2009
It Ain’t Hard to Tell: The Legacy of ‘Illmatic’
The "half-man, half-amazin'", Nas' persona is part myth and part "everyday kid" from the Queensbridge projects.
Friday, July 17 2009
The Audacity of Certain Black Ballers
The distance we’ve come from Jackie Robinson hawking Chock Full o’Nuts coffee in the ‘50s, and black A-list jocks hawking virtually anything under the sun today, is astounding.
Tuesday, July 7 2009
Truth Against Truth: The Work of Adrian Tomine
Tomine has a gift for capturing body language and facial expressions -- his characters often say more in a silent panel than most say with an entire word balloon.
Wednesday, June 24 2009
Snagged by Bishop—Hook, Line & Sinker
Like the lakes we fish in, there are great treasures lurking in those depths, and great depth lurking in those treasures.
Tuesday, June 23 2009
Augusten Burroughs: The View Through a Saltine Cracker
As a memoirist, Burroughs is highly skilled at the art of aestheticized self-pity.
Wednesday, June 17 2009
Out of Tune and ‘Amplified’
As George Orwell said, “Nearly every book is capable of arousing passionate feeling, even if it is only a passionate dislike.”
Monday, June 8 2009
Blood Meridian: The Last of the True
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian has been called unfilmable, but that doesn't stop Ben Nichols from getting ahead of the game and crafting a worthy soundtrack.
Tuesday, June 2 2009
Is the ‘New York Times’ Tracking Porn Sales Now?
That “comics” persists in connoting “pulp” and “graphic novels” implies something “literary” is purely a matter of convention, and is not because those are the inherent meanings or implications of the terms.
Friday, May 29 2009
Depression 2.0: Sunday in Kerouac Alley
Scott Thorson rang, flat broke and disabled, in chronic, horrendous pain from a botched murder attempt and an even more botched plastic surgery, hoping that I would serve as his conduit for another lucrative laundry airing.
Tuesday, May 26 2009
Let the Right One In, But Only the Right One
Lindqvist’s book and Alfredson’s film adaptation both convey a sweet, dark version of puppy love. We don’t need the American remake.
Thursday, May 21 2009
The Myth of the Rational Market
How silly we were to believe that investors always acted with predictable rapacity and efficiency.
Wednesday, May 13 2009
Obama is The Boss
What Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen share is an understanding that real life happens on the ground, regardless of the hot ideological winds blowing through Crawford or Washington D.C. or talk radio.
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.
