“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” (David Foster Wallace) It is hard to witness the simple acrobatics of Certified Copy and […]
I remember the first time I saw Lady Gaga perform on TV. She was seated at a very large and very pink piano brimming with plastic bubbles. She had barely tickled the flamingo ivory before strutting center stage to engage in a most bizarre choreography. At the time, Lady Gaga was still becoming the icon […]
This is the best I can do translating the barely legible notes I made, and completing sentence fragments I scribbled, in a darkened theatre during a screening of Kelly Reichardt’s film Meek’s Cutoff: “Dry.” That’s how the film feels. Muted colors, in an area where there is no alternative — Eastern Oregon. Nothing interesting or […]
I have one goal as an artist: not to sit on my ass. For me, art is action in all of its variety of forms. Performance artists, then, should be pushing the boundaries of action, daring to engage with the environment, culture, and most importantly, other people as intensely as possible. I want to do the […]
It used to be that superheroes were merely comic book fodder. Then they became Saturday morning fare. In both cases one was likely to find poor writing and cheap animation that stretched most minds when it came to suspension of disbelief. Even when the superheroes started appearing in blockbusters, such as the Superman series in […]
That contemporary America is captivated by the phenomenon of celebrity is hardly a contestable observation. Even those of us who try to limit the impact of celebrity on our life find that its tenacity is hard to overcome. Some try to overcome the impact of celebrity by willing its insignificance. But that some energy is […]
In March of 2009, Filmwell was born. But what was it? httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX4fog2rsAo And what the hell is it now? Some quick background: After collaborating about movies for several years, film blogger Michael Leary and I invited a small group of thoughtful moviegoers, reviewers, and bloggers to collaborate on a website where we would share miscellaneous […]
Over the past few years, the enigmatic Lady Gaga has emerged as the ultimate pop icon. Her outrageous antics (such as arriving at the Grammys in an egg) and avant-garde fashion sense (a recent development seems to be prosthetic protuberances on her forehead) have made her the larger-than-life, symbolic […]
This continues my previous post. ———————————————————– G. K. Chesterton hated people-breeding. Eugenics, which he called “a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning,” was perhaps the only idea that he wrote an entire book to destroy (Eugenics and Other Evils, 1922).1 It’s easy to forget how mainstream eugenics was in the early twentieth century, […]