Books
A mad, wonderful adventure
In her first book, Parched, Heather King documents twenty years of worshipping alcohol to the point, as she says, she was “willing to sacrifice everything: career, family, money, health, reputation, my life, and what is far worse than any of those, my soul, for alcohol.” Her second book Redeemed – A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles toward God,… READ MORE >
Movies
Mission Impossible
Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest was a novel about Hitler narrated by a demon, who writes: “Most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil…There need be no surprise, then, that the world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler’s personality.” I was… READ MORE >
Movies
The Ugly Truth
When Caden Cotard wakes up, the first thing he does is look in a mirror. He sees a pudgy, middle-aged, balding, sad-sack of a human being. The rest of the movie will be like that: a merciless self-examination. Neil Gaiman, sci-fi and fantasy author, described most current literary fiction as “miserable people having small epiphanies of misery.”… READ MORE >
Books
Burgeoning Beats
A legendary manuscript co-written by Beat Masters, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, has finally come to light as And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Written when both were unknown and unpublished, leading hardscrabble lives in wartime New York, the real-life story centers on the doomed relationship between Lucien Carr and… READ MORE >
Movies
Blood Lust
Twilight begs the question, why do girls always go for vampires? Is it the Byronic good looks? Or perhaps because they’re given to lines like, “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you,” and “You’re my own personal brand of heroin.” Bella, a junior in high school recently relocated from Arizona… READ MORE >
Music
Mercy Knows My Name
There’s a pseudo-myth in rock music that drug-abusing artists lose their edge when they clean up their act. Their music, once forged in the crucible of angst and addiction, is softened and sanitized by sobriety. It’s a popular theory, especially among would-be rock stars without a label contract but with a dealer contact. To paraphrase… READ MORE >
Movies
Guy Movie
Who or what is a RocknRolla? Someone born to be in a Guy Ritchie flick, that’s who. An amoral member of the criminal class doing bad things in stylish threads and an expensive pair of shades, spouting tough-lout talk like a Cockney at a Tarantino casting call. Ritchie’s first and best movies were Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels… READ MORE >
Books
A Hipster’s Homily
Chuck Klosterman acquits himself well with his first novel, Downtown Owl. He’s better known as a wiseass essayist on movies, video games, heavy-metal music and pop culture miscellany for publications like Esquire, Spin, and The Guardian. An ominous news clipping prefaces Downtown Owl, reporting on a vicious blizzard that claimed the… READ MORE >
Music
Man of Sorrow and Strife
If, in his early days, middle-class Minnesotan Bob Zimmerman playacted the persona of hobo troubador Bob Dylan, he has since evolved into the genuine article, an authentic Elder Statesman of American music. Dylan’s late-career flowering, which began with 1997’s death-haunted, Time Out of Mind (though 1989’s Oh Mercy had its… READ MORE >
Movies
Don’t Call Me Junior
No one could accuse Oliver Stone of ducking controversy. But I don’t think anyone expected his new movie about the George Bush presidency, W., to be predictable and toothless, if intermittently amusing. In the era of the internet and insider confessionals, most of what appears on screen has already been widely circulated. What, Bush… READ MORE >
Movies
Conservulous
A movie mocking Hollywood liberals is overdue, but a movie mocking Michael Moore is outdated. David Zucker, director of zany comedies like Airplane and Naked Gun, sets his satirical sights on a ripe target: the self-satisfaction of bleeding-heart Hollywood liberals (the kind who decry world poverty while collecting multi-million dollar paychecks).… READ MORE >
Music
Cosmic Slop
Yes, it’s The Verve’s fourth album, Forth. A bad pun is a suspicious beginning for an album with philosophical pretensions, especially since the word “forth” suggests a progression, when Forth is more like a reminder: “Remember us? We’re The Verve. We used to make epic Britpop. We still do.” The clouds… READ MORE >
Movies
Funny as Hell
There’s a segment of the Tonight Show called “Jaywalking,” where Jay Leno asks regular Joes (“Joe Sixpacks”?) simple questions about history, politics, geography, etc. Considering the answers he gets, you’d think Burbank a social experiment gone wrong. Bill Maher, host of Politically Incorrect, adopts the… READ MORE >
Books
Rushdie, The Enchanter
In 1988, Sir Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses earned the Indian-British author a rare honor: a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination, issued by a faction of Muslim extremists. The fatwa granted Rushdie the social distinction of martyrdom without its one significant disadvantage, as the author continued to collect awards and… READ MORE >
Books
Disasters of War
So here we are, facing a global economic collapse and an election where both candidates represent the lesser of another evil. It’s time to turn to Kurt Vonnegut, whose unique blend of bleak humor, genuine outrage, and dark surreality seems more relevant than ever, and more cogent than a cadre of political and economic analysts. Armageddon… READ MORE >
Movies
God is Godard
Reprise is a movie about young Norwegian writers that feels made by young French filmmakers: stylish, self-conscious, angsty, funny, a little sloppy, and unapologetically pretentious. Erik and Philip are two aspiring writers and lifelong friends who simultaneously slide their manuscripts (as precious to them as bundled babies) into a mail… READ MORE >
Books
The Same Man?
I suspect that the title of this little dual biography was intended to produce in the potential reader (i.e., anyone even a little familiar with Waugh and Orwell) precisely the reaction it produced in me upon hearing it: I exclaimed something to the effect of, “Say what?” and promptly plunked down twenty-six bucks (minus my local indie… READ MORE >
Books
Roth’s Wrath
It’s not quite a twist on the level of The Sixth Sense (I read dead people?), but you may raise an eyebrow fifty-or-so pages into Indignation: our narrator is not only unreliable, he may not be corporeal. Philip Roth’s idea of the Afterlife is apparently similar to his idea of Old Age: mourn lost youth, nurse grudges, and rage… READ MORE >
Music
Lord, Can You Hear Me?
Sometime last year, Spiritualized frontman, Jason Pierce, found himself in the UK equivalent of the E.R, the Accident & Emergency ward, undergoing treatment for double-pneumonia. It would be tempting to conclude that this brush with mortality inspired Pierce’s latest album’s worth of death-haunted sonic swells, Songs in A &… READ MORE >
Books
How to avoid the next war
If you’re concerned about where Republican fear-mongering on the war on terror might lead us, don’t turn to the Democrats, who when it counted caved in to Bush on the Iraq War (and now mostly echo McCain/Palin’s position on the Middle East). Instead, go to clear-eyed foreign policy realists like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski… READ MORE >
Books
Twice-told Tales
Our Story Begins collects new and older short-stories by Tobias Wolff, one of America’s acknowledged masters of the genre. Wolff-hounds will recognize canonical works like “Hunters in the Snow,” “Bullet in the Brain,” and “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” short-form masterpieces that have… READ MORE >
Movies
League of Morons
After doing the damn near impossible—making last year's damn near perfect No Country For Old Men—who could blame the Coen brothers for blowing off a little steam? Burn After Reading returns to the anarchic comedy of Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, but with diminished returns. Like the suitcase full of cash in No Country,… READ MORE >
Books
Paul Auster, In the Dark
In Paul Auster’s new novel, the ‘Man in the Dark’ is August Brill, a retired book critic with a broken leg, a broken heart, and a serious bout of insomnia. Lacking the season of all natures, sleep, Brill endures an endless cycle of dark nights of the soul by making up escapist stories in his head, an activity that dampens his… READ MORE >
Movies
Brideshead Revised
Nearly every review of the new film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited has referenced the landmark 1981 miniseries produced for British television starring Jeremy Irons, John Gielgud, Claire Bloom, and Laurence Olivier. With good reason: the 11-hour adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel is an obvious entry into the canon of Modern Classics,… READ MORE >
TV
J.J. Abrams’ Mystery Boxes
With the debut of his latest TV series Fringe last week, J. J. Abrams—the writer/director/producer behind Lost, Felicity, and Alias—is back in the spotlight to talk about why he did the things he did with his new, much anticipated sci-fi show. Opening to mixed reviews, the X-Files-esque-medical-puzzle series promises to deliver… READ MORE >
Movies
For This Documentary Tells Me So
The idea that documentaries are unbiased truth is well-established nonsense, of course, but some filmmakers are better at covering their ideological tracks than others (the good ones are, anyway). For the Bible Tells Me So tackles a tough, timely topic: the antagonism between Christian fundamentalists and practicing homosexuals. This complex… READ MORE >
Music
Not-So-Merry Prankster
He’s been a four-track folk singer, found-sound experimenter, hip-hop beatmaster, Dada-ist lyricist, postmodern collage artist, and mock funk-soul crooner. He mixes electronica and harmonica. He mixes dance beats and downbeat blues. Then he remixes. If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds then shapeshifting singer-songwriter… READ MORE >
Movies
Gonzo Suicide
Gonzo should have been subtitled “The Life and Work and Death of Hunter S. Thompson,” because the writer’s suicide three years ago was the flare-out of a fading star, a premeditated decision that shrouded his last moments in existential uncertainty. Did the Lion in Winter flip a final bird to established conventions, rebel… READ MORE >
Music
REM’s Comeback
"…for a supposed comeback attempt, R.E.M. doesn't seem desperate to be loved here. Much of Accelerate actually sounds fired-up and angry: ‘Living Well Is the Best Revenge’ is an aggressive opening salvo, the oblique narrative of ‘Mr. Richards’ finds Stipe at his most effectively political, and the gritty, double-speed ‘Horse to Water’ is the album's most self-critical song… If it isn't able to recapture the post-punk energy of Reckoning, the political fury of Life's Rich Pageant, or the epic scope of Automatic for the People, the album, at the very least, finds the band playing to its strengths rather than attempting to explore an increasingly thin artistic mythology. That alone justifies Accelerate's positive buzz, even if the album doesn't quite support the magnitude of it.”
READ MORE >
Books
Holy Man: What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?
“’The more he gave himself to the world,’ Iyer writes, the more Tibetans have come to feel ‘like natural children bewildered by the fact that their father has adopted three others.’ …Avidly embracing the liberating ideas of the secular metropolis, the Dalai Lama resembles the two emblematic types who have shaped the modern age, for better and for worse—the provincial fleeing ossified custom and the refugee fleeing totalitarianism. Even so, his critics may have a point: the Dalai Lama’s citizenship in the global cosmopolis seems to come at a cost to his dispossessed people… It is hard to see the Dalai Lama bringing about mutual understanding in the world at large when he has failed to bring it about between China and Tibet.” READ MORE >
Books
Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium
“About the Lower East Side today,’ Mr. Price said, ‘This place is like Byzantium. It’s tomorrow, yesterday — anyplace but today.’ ... ‘Lush Life’ took so long to finish, he said, in part because he spent so much time researching it — talking to people, riding around with the neighborhood police and sometimes just walking around. ‘I always like to hang out,’ he said, ‘because, one, it’s a way of avoiding really writing; and, two, sometimes God is a crackerjack novelist and you can plagiarize the hell out of him.’ He particularly liked hanging out with cops, he said, ‘because I’m so not a cop myself. Being with them gets me out of my own self-consciousness.’” READ MORE >
Movies
Rated G for Glorious
“…In the Jungle of Nool something foreign lands on a piece of clover. It's not a spaceship but an entire alien world: the nearly infinitesimal planet of Who-ville. Horton the elephant, his large ears giving him the most acute hearing, detects cries from the clover speck. He can't see the little Whos, but he deduces, believes, knows that sentient creatures are in there; and his caring instinct tells him that they must be protected. He builds a rapport with the tiny planet's resident scientist, Dr. Hoovey, who is having just as much trouble convincing his villagers that there's a giant outside force, unseen but benevolent, that will determine their future." READ MORE >
Books
Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana
“Far from pushing boundaries, or the church's buttons, Rice's portrayal of Jesus as the son of God and the savior of humankind is theologically sound. At the same time, he's also very human, with needs and cares readers can relate to. ‘It's an attempt to get close to him and what he experienced, to make it historically exciting and historically correct,’ she said. Writing the books ‘has made me conscious of what (Jesus) suffered in the way of derision and dismissal … Just like today -- people go around making jokes about him. But he goes right on winning souls no matter what anybody does. We've come 2,000 years, and you can still sit at his feet and hear him speak and feel his hand, maybe, touch your shoulder. He survives it all.’" READ MORE >
Movies
Board Game: Gus Van Sant’s latest experiment works
“The book is linear and psychological and even invokes Dostoyevsky—Notes From the Underground… and, by implication, Crime and Punishment. Van Sant dumps Dostoyevsky and ruptures the story line; his narrator, Alex, apologizes for screwing up the order of events… Alienation, guilt—it’s all free-floating, as if Camus had reworked Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.”’ READ MORE >
Books
The Last Triumph of Fatima
The centrality of Fatima to the second, ‘suffering servant’ stage of John Paul II's papacy, and his involvement with the two men who would become the Vatican's numbers one and two after his death, may help explain why Lucia's cause has been fast-tracked for beatification... In the book, Bertone seems relieved that all the Virgin's prophecies were now safely in the past tense, and could no longer be seen as portending the world's end: ‘It's all quite different from the massive carnage certain fevered brains like to imagine taking place,’ he writes… READ MORE >
Books
The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors
…Dan Ariely’s new book, ‘Predictably Irrational,’ an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says… So what can be done? One answer, he says, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: ‘In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.’” READ MORE >
Movies
Penn’s ‘Into the Wild’ Is Beautiful, Stirring, Complex
"…too-muchness is the essence of the story—a hero's gallant, possibly mad and inevitably doomed attempt to channel too much experience and too many ideas through one young life that can't possibly hold it all… Moviegoers will argue the question of whether the young man's quest succeeds or fails: Is he a pilgrim who finds the transcendence he sought, or a wounded bird flying blind on lofty ambitions, or both? There's no arguing, however, that ‘Into the Wild’ is a new experience, even though some of its countercultural themes and tropes may seem familiar. It's a mainstream movie of ideas that lives in a world of fateful action.” READ MORE >
Books
After the Apocalypse
“As they travel the father feeds his son a story, the nearest that he can come to a creed or a reason to keep on going: that he and his son are ‘carrying the fire.’ …the boy seems to intuit a promise: that life will not always be thus; that it will improve, that beauty and purpose, sunlight and green plenty will return; in short that everything is going to be ‘okay,’ a word which both characters endlessly repeat to each other, touching it compulsively like a sore place or a missing tooth. They are carrying the fire through a world destroyed by fire, and therefore—a leap of logic or faith that by the time the novel opens has become almost insurmountable for both of them—the boy must struggle on, so that he can be present at, or somehow contribute to, the eventual rebirth of the world.” READ MORE >
Movies
California Burning
“A strange and enthralling evocation of frontier capitalism and manifest destiny set at the dawn of the 20th century… There's hardly a dull moment. Digs collapse, gushers burst into flame, God metes out punishment and so does man. Revelations overturn the narrative: The last 20 minutes are as shocking in their way as the plague that rains from the sky in Magnolia's finale. By the time the closing words "There Will Be Blood" appear (with a burst of Brahms) inscribed in heavy gothic letters on the screen, Anderson's movie has come to seem an Old Testament story of cosmic comeuppance and filicidal madness—American history glimpsed through the smoke and fire that the lightning left behind.” READ MORE >
Books
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
“Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off ‘American Idol’ and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism… Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a ‘cultural conservationist.’” READ MORE >
Music
Dark Star: Why Amy Winehouse is not just a celebrity train wreck
“…she's a romantic poet of the train wreck… Amy Winehouse is a genuinely troubled soul; the songs on Back to Black chronicle her tumultuous relationship with Fielder-Civil, and ‘Rehab’ is reportedly something close to reportage, a more or less autobiographical account of her record company's efforts to get her into alcohol-addiction treatment back in 2005. But one wonders if Winehouse would have turned into quite such a mess had it not proved so fruitful for her music… If indeed Sunday night's Grammy triumph is the start of true comeback, this talented singer-songwriter may find herself facing something of an existential career crisis... READ MORE >
Books
Death’s Army
“Americans had never endured anything like the losses they suffered between 1861 and 1865 and have experienced nothing like them since." The author writes: “’The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.’ Her account of how that work was done, much of it gleaned from the letters of those who found themselves forced to do it, is too richly detailed and covers too much ground to be summarized easily. She overlooks nothing — from the unsettling enthusiasm some men showed for killing to the near-universal struggle for an answer to the question posed by the Confederate poet Sidney Lanier: ‘How does God have the heart to allow it?’” READ MORE >
Movies
Another ‘Pro-Life” Movie?
"...after the movie ended I wondered what all the fuss was about... I wonder how much of the adulation of reviewers (and the judges at Cannes) stemmed from what they may have perceived as the 'message' of the movie: i.e., illegal abortions are bad, so legal ones must be good. For me, the movie was a litany of the horrors of any abortion, and as much a 'pro-life' movie as 'Juno,' which I had seen the day before. How can observing a lifeless fetus make one anything but pro-life?" READ MORE >
TV
“Lost,” that endless engrossing philosophical mish-mash
Like cramming fistfuls of metaphysical crayons back into their tiny box, the Island on "Lost" can barely contain all the colorful epistemologies in its midst. It is a big stew of Philosophy 101's greatest hits... It's like the Monty Python sketch, "International Philosophy," in which Greek and German philosophers battle it out on the soccer field (Socrates's winning goal is contested by Hegel as not being an "a priori reality"). Back on "Lost" Philosophy Island, the implications are just as absurd: After all, if everything is imbued with meaning, then how meaningful is any one thing? READ MORE >
Books
The Dawkins Confusion
“The God Delusion is full of bluster and bombast, but it really doesn’t give even the slightest reason for thinking belief in God mistaken, let alone a ‘delusion.’ Dawkins seems to have chosen God as his sworn enemy. (Let’s hope for Dawkins’ sake God doesn’t return the compliment.)... You might say… READ MORE >
Music
Wilco frontman takes a more direct lyrical approach on striking new album
“...alienation seemed to be the point on Wilco’s overly arch art-rock projects Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, but on Sky Blue Sky Tweedy reaches out from his solitude in hopes of meeting his listeners—both the woman in the song and the strangers buying his CDs—face-to-face… The album’s title track contrasts our… READ MORE >
Movies
A Chronicler of Alienated Europeans in a Flimsy New World
“Mr. Antonioni’s fashionableness shouldn’t distract us from his accomplishment. He was a visionary whose portrayal of the failure of Eros in a hypereroticized climate addressed the modern world and its discontents in a new, intensely poetic cinematic language. Here was depicted for the first time on screen a world in which attention… READ MORE >
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