March 2010
51 posts
February 2010
33 posts
"She is far out, and at the same time common. So... →
“She is strange. So are the plays of Behan, Genet and Brecht.”
Hughes was just getting warmed up. “She is different. So was Billie Holiday, St. Francis and John Donne. So is Mort Sahl, so is Ernie Banks.” He continued: “You either like her or you don’t. If you don’t, you won’t. If you do — wheee-ouuueu! You do!”
(Books of The Times - ‘Princess Noire,’ Nadine Cohodas’s Biography of Nina...
I write about Laura Gibson and Ethan Rose in the... →
LAURA GIBSON WAS IN her 20s when she wrote her first song. It came not from a yearning to emulate the Skip James or Elizabeth Cotten records she had begun to check out from her hometown Coquille Library, but from the necessary mental lapses of the day—those moments you either fill with work or boredom or, most likely, a combination of the two. She put words to an Americana-inspired tune, and many...
I write about Eric Rohmer for More Intelligent... →
Comedy isn’t pretty, so the cliché goes. Yet the unconventional rom-coms of Eric Rohmer—who died in Paris on January 11th, aged 89—were beautiful, often seductively so. Never was this more true than in his “Six Moral Tales”. The stills from this celebrated series of his earliest films recall cigarette ads in Esquire magazine, circa 1970: postcard-worthy landscapes fill the frame and...
"'They Learned About Women' (1930) offers the...
Oh! Another one of those.
(Rise of Talkies - When Hollywood Last Explored a New World - NYTimes.com)
I write about Van Dyke Parks for the Portland... →
EVEN BEFORE WE have a chance to talk, Van Dyke Parks lets his suspicions be known. “You’re most kind… so far!” reads an email he sends my way. During our interview, he warns in an aside, “I think the truth should be avoided at all costs—certainly in terms of publicity.”
So for a while—via Parks’ natural skepticism—I’m cast on the wrong side of rock...
Michael C. Moynihan writes in Reason, "It is clear... →
(Thanks for the heads-up, Bullet Point Ballet.)
At NYRblog, Timothy Snyder writes, "There is also... →
“President Yushchenko has called for an international tribunal to judge Stalinist crimes in Ukraine. Simpler would be cooperation among the national memory institutes of post-Communist Europe: rotation of their staff historians from country to country, sharing of documents from archive to archive, and joint research on repressive policies. Without such ventilation, the memory ministries can...
Excerpts from a conversation with songwriter Van...
Albert Brooks's vision of humor analysis run amok... →