Why Is Opera So Derided in America?
Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel offers everything movie goers seek: debauchery, religious obsession, exorcisms, devilish abuses, graphic sexual assault, and a variety of horrific effects both musical and visual.
The Cult In Culture
Let’s Play at Kentucky Fried Chicken, America
In this game we consumers are reduced to plastic playthings, happy to be fingered. This and other thoughts on American culture.
Celestial Sound: Thoughts on Mahler’s Third Symphony
To listen to Mahler is to claim your soul hasn’t been splintered by postmodernity -- even if you hate Mahler and disbelieve in the soul.
Cacophonies and Heavenly Choruses: A Cure for the Classical Blues
Is there any term in any field that is more slippery or meaningless or that carries such impossible, historically artificial burdens of meaning as "Classical Music"?
Searching for Value in All the Wrong Places, Or How to Put Away Childish Things
More than fetishizing his prizes, the collector fetishizes his own obsessiveness and glorious blindness to the machinations of what non-collectors call “real life”.
Werner Herzog’s Films Ask, What More Is Mankind Than Nature’s Parasite?
For Werner Herzog, mankind’s tug-of-war with nature is not a present imbalance but a lost cause, the barbarous beauty of nature made mere barbarism by humankind.
The Gunman on the Unemployment Line: Masculinity, Professionalism, and Ethical Bankruptcy
Surely even Dirty Harry needs a break from cinematic violence, some time off at Walden Pond. Though I doubt its tranquility would deter him from picking off the sparrows.
The Virtues of Faithlessness: Dario Argento’s Dracula 3-D and the Crutch of Tradition
What can it mean for Dario Argento, auteur extraordinaire, to forsake his unique melding of fearless style and fearless silliness and instead submit to Bram Stoker?