Too long; do not read.
Another May Day come and gone and the foundations crumble just a little more. What has the working class won since we last celebrated the busman`s holiday? What gains has it made, what victories has it won beyond the daily fight to stay alive and toil another day? Even the latter, …
We were our century’s cowboys; explorers of inner space, the last adventurers. We charted the only empty terrain left under heaven or on earth. We were the superstars in a world without borders, and yet to look at us today, you’d think we were nothing more than criminals. With legalization …
It looks like the Russians let us down again. Of course, it was the bloody Russians letting us down in the first place that put the four of us here, in a second-rate room in a Hyatt Regency that disgraces the words “Hyatt” and “regency”. It was because they couldn’t …
I sat down to write a review of Terrence Malick’s latest film, To the Wonder, with the goal of speaking only of the work itself, an approach I have often found valuable in music writing: by trimming off the fat, by burying the excess, by considering only the art under contemplation …
As you may remember, at the start of the war against Iraq ten years ago, Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the widespread opposition to the invasion, especially in Europe, which stood in marked contrast to European support for previous American military endeavors. His reply: “Now, you’re thinking of Europe as …
The whole evening had a distinctively ’70s flair about it: we drove out to Shoreline, a northern suburb of Seattle, to the Crest Cinema Center to see my first movie since relocating to the Pacific Northwest. The Crest was built in 1949, and seems quite specifically stuck in time, the …
Klansman. This game is no different from Amarillo, except that the center cards are laid out in the shape of a cross. The card in the center of the cross is then set on fire. Once the entire structure is burning, the players take turns stabbling, punching or kicking a …
Oh, lies. Lies are what make us human, what keep us from being bored to death; lies are the very foundation of our civilization. (Sure, when Pablo Picasso says stuff like this, you say he’s profound; when I say it, you roll your eyes at me.) Lies form the basis …
Suicide, as a tactic of war, seems to hold a particular horror for us. Because it is so seemingly foreign to the West (although, really, it bears little distinction from the kind of hopeless charges entirely common to the era of modern warfare), we tend to cite it as a …
Auteur theory has been taking it on the chin lately. Never especially strong in this country — as opposed to Europe, where it has even been allowed to influence matters of copyright, in a shockingly communistic example of art being given primacy over commerce — it’s really taken a beating …
Akira Kurosawa’s films have become something of a sticky wicket for me. He’s obviously one of the greats of cinema, and at his best he’s nearly untouchable, but with some of his most lionized films, familiarity has bred, if not contempt, at least discomfort. The more I watch them, the …
Parker, the amoral and ultra-efficient criminal featured in 24 novels by Donald Westlake, has been kicked around Hollywood almost as much as he’s been kicked around in his books. He was luckiest in his earliest and latest adaptations; Point Blank, the 1967 film that adapted Parker’s debut in The Hunter, was only …
This is the kind of entry I hate to write — not only because I know nobody’s listening, but because it’s about issues that I fear that there may be no solution to, or at least not the starkly delineated solution that people who think they’ve figured it out seem …
For reasons I don’t enjoy being yelled at enough to go into, the subject of violence has been much on the minds of my fellow Americans the last few months. The current way of thinking seems to be that certain types of violence exist as a sort of protected category, …
I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that being a witness to even the most electrifying events is no guarantee of recalling them accurately. The men and women who survived the sinking of the Titanic disagreed as to exactly how the great ship went down, even though they all saw it at …
