All Creatures Here Below is a Midwestern tragedy that, scene by scene, grows incrementally more horrific. Tearing open the wounds of childhood trauma, the director, Collin Schiffli, and his writer, David Dastmalchian, immerse us in the desperate acts of a young runaway couple, then dare us to condemn them. [Read more…]
Head-Spinning Intrigue And Landmark Cinema In Zhang Yimou’s Shadow
After the limp 2017 film The Great Wall, the director Zhang Yimou was clearly looking to enact a return to form. With Shadow (2019), Zhang has done more than that: he’s created a martial-arts movie landmark, as strong in its performances as it is spectacularly novel in its violence. [Read more…]
Kristen Roupenian’s You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories
You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories
by Kristen Roupenian
Scout, 225 pp., $24.99
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books
It has happened only twice in nearly seventy years: a short story appears in The New Yorker and goes viral, setting off an avalanche of responses. Some readers, fooled by its up-to-date style, misinterpret it as a piece of reportage. Others attack the author as a sadist or a misanthrope. And many more are simply confused about what it means. Is it an allegory for the suffering that women face under patriarchy? A screed that indicts contemporary society more generally? Or just a tale taken from everyday life in which something goes horribly wrong? [Read more…]
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
by Sarah Smarsh
Scribner, 290 pp., $26.00
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books
As told in her ambitious and moving new memoir, Heartland, Sarah Smarsh’s life was ripped right out of a Bruce Springsteen song. “Spare Parts,” for one: “Bobby said he’d pull out Bobby stayed in/Janey had a baby it wasn’t any sin.”
That’s pretty much the tale the author tells of her own conception, except that her father was Nick and her mother was seventeen-year-old Jeannie. On Halloween night, 1979, Nick and Jeannie are having sex in his parents’ basement when Jeannie says, “Don’t come in me!” Nick pays no attention. Like most Springsteen songs, the story ends in melancholy, or what Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, his great Victorian novel about the debasement of poor country women, called “the ache of modernism.” [Read more…]
The Great Dick Dale, Dead At 81
RIP
1937 -2019
“Misirlou,” 1963, from the film A Swinging Affair
Riot At The Astor Place Opera House
My first historical theater experience was at 16, when my mom took me to see Jason Robards star as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O’Neil. The dialogue was deep, fast-paced, dramatic, the characters themselves characteristically downmarket. The play, in brief, revolves around a classic crew of bottom-of-the-barrel drunks, has-beens who never were, pimps who claimed they were bartenders and their sleazy whores in a bar at the bottom of a flophouse in lower Manhattan in 1907. Harry Hope, the benevolent proprietor of the Greenwich Village Saloon, had not been outside the establishment in the years since his sainted wife had met her maker. [Read more…]
Jan Švankmajer’s Insects: On Meaning in Surrealist Film
Last year, Jan Švankmajer, the great master of surrealist cinema, returned to his roots with another stop-motion film mixed with live footage in the same vein as his classics Alice (1988) and Faust (1994). Yet there is something that is immediately striking in Insects (2018), namely that it keeps breaking the fourth wall and working with meta-levels. There is, first, an introduction where Švankmajer speaks directly to the audience, offering cues to how the movie is supposed to be understood. Then, throughout the film we see how the practical and stop-motion effects were created; we witness various stage directions to the actors, who each talk about their dreams to the camera. Finally, as Insects is somewhat of an adaptation of a play by the brothers Čapek, we ourselves witness an amateur theatre group working on its adaptation. [Read more…]
Who Holds The Stag’s Head Gets to Speak
Dear God who lives inside the stag’s head
even after the stag’s shot and lies slumped and abashed
on the forest floor. Protect him.
Even after he’s been heaved onto the car’s dark roof.
Forest Green. Or Pacific Blue. Nowhere he can see.
His body stiffens like a trellis above the driver.
Help him. Hold him in your sight. [Read more…]
Norman Rockwell v. The State Of Public Art
Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, & The Four Freedoms
A traveling exhibition, with Reimagining the Four Freedoms
currently at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Washington, DC (through April 29)
Reviewed by Kevin Baker
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine
The fight over which of our public monuments should remain where they are is as complicated as the American past they commemorate. For all the fighting over who and what we should not honor from our past, there is one vital element that has been missing from the argument: that is, what we should honor and aspire to now. [Read more…]
Caramelized Onion, Mushroom, Kale & Aged Gruyere Quiche
1 Trader Joe’s pie crust
1 big or two small sweet yellow onions
4-5 leaves Tuscan kale
1 pack 3/4 oz Oyster mushrooms
1/2 pack 3/4 oz Shitake mushrooms
1 1/4 cup grated Cave aged Gruyere cheese
2 sprigs fresh thyme
Butter, as needed for sautéing
3/4 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup whole milk
4 eggs
Salt to taste
Ground White pepper to taste
Fresh cracked Black pepper to taste
9-10” pie dish for baking
Remove pie curst and let sit at room temperature for an hour or hour and a half. Unroll pie crust without removing the plastic film on both sides. If you see cracks take a rolling pin and smooth out the cracks and the edges rolling over the plastic films. Remove one side of the plastic film and place the crust facing down in your pie dish. Remove the other side of the film and bake the pie crust as instructed on the Trader Joe’s pie crust package. Do not forget to prick holes in the crust before baking as suggested. After baking let cool at room temperature. [Read more…]
Another Charming (And Delightfully Dark) Short From Pixar: Kitbull
Written and Directed by Rosana Sullivan. Produced by Kathryn Hendrickson.
Theatricum Botanicum Sees Plants As Dynamic Agents Of History
“I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now — in order to support the moral contradictions of and the spiritual aridity of life — expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want is power — and no one holds power forever.” –James Baldwin, Letter from a Region in my Mind
In November 2017, at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, French president Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech that cracked open a pandora’s box of sorts. “I cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several African countries is in France,” Macron told a rather skeptical audience, further proclaiming that he expected within five years “the conditions to be met for the temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa.” Whether or not this was intended as a diplomatic platitude, almost a year to the day a landmark report on the question of repatriation, commissioned by Macron, was published. And with that report, a wider crack appeared. [Read more…]
Hunting in the Dark
Joan was convinced she had cancer. Sometimes it was a dull ache in her side, sometimes a cut that didn’t heal. She knew of a woman with Crohn’s Disease and just recently an old friend of hers died of pancreatic cancer. It was just a matter of time before those alien cells took over her body. Her body was on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. When she got out her Tarot deck, she always drew the Fool. Once she saw the Hermit in a dream. He dropped his lantern and the light tumbled down into a rocky canyon, glowing on the silver cliffs as it fell. It was winter, with pockets of snow on the peaks. [Read more…]
Smoked Lavender And Berry Compote
Small pack of blueberries
Small pack of raspberries
Small pack of blackberries
Fresh lavender
1½ pinch Hepps smoked salt
¾ cup raw cane sugar
Place all the ingredients in a pot and simmer on a medium flame until it turns to mush. Let cool and refrigerate. Serve on bread, a scone, and the compote goes wonderfully with cheese, crackers and a glass of wine. Will last up to 10 days refrigerated. [Read more…]
Where to Begin?
First, we’re skinny-dipping,
Sam & I, in a pond in Tennessee,
which is his idea, I should say,
& the tree with the rope swing
looms darker
than the dark night sky.
Second, the harvest moon,
which we came here to see,
is nowhere to be found,
instead the sky burning with stars
I can’t see without my glasses [Read more…]
Walk to Vegas Has Legs, And Is A Sure-Footed Comedy To Boot
In the character-driven lineage of such classics as Goodfellas, Big Lebowski, and True Romance; Walk to Vegas (written by Vincent Van Patten and Steve Alper; directed by Eric Balfour) features a brotherhood that operates on an informal black-market economy impervious to the rules of law, other than the innate sense of honor established through direct eye contact, firm handshakes, and camaraderie. It is a den of high-stakes Hollywood gamblers continuously engaging one another in ever-more outrageous ante-upping, dares and bets that culminate in our protagonist, Vincent VanPatten, attempting a walk from LA to Vegas in seven days in a suit. The characters of this instant classic — played by such greats as Eileen Davidson, Jennifer Tilly, Danny Pardo, Paul Walter Hauser, and James VanPatten, are straight out of Cervantes. The result: pure comic genius. [Read more…]
Penal Cistern Lightning Throne Lightning Rebounded
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Back into the body all the lightning goes
back into the body. Up through the crown
of the skull and round again like the Whip-It
at the fairgrounds. Pushing the boundaries
of the light body. Overloading the light
body. Silly bowl shaking above the bowl
of the skull, which is a bowl holding court over
bowl the brain. Bowl into bowl into bowl.
All the curves pressing together. Too much
light in the light body. Body of cattle after long [Read more…]
La Luz’s “Cicada”
Pain Scale
by Catherine Barnett
Floating above the gynecologist’s hands,
Dolor looks down at me
with her many expressions.
Someone sketched the eyes, the mouths,
someone pinned them up,
arranged the faces
so they softly say, like this? like this?
The doctor says to choose one,
but I’m no fool, I close my eyes [Read more…]
Gary Indiana’s Vile Days
Vile Days, by Gary Indiana,
edited by Bruce Hainley.
Semiotext(e). 600 pages. $29.95.
Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine
How unromantic can a deathbed scene get? A test case: one day in 2015, The New Yorker’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, makes his way to the Village Voice’s Cooper Square offices, seeking to rescue the columns he wrote for the alt-weekly in the 1990s from their undigitized obscurity. Let in by a staff member who seems slack-jawed that anyone should be so keen to enter, Schjeldahl observes the paper’s remaining employees: “A very few people, not appearing to be up to much, sat far apart at desks in a dimly lighted panorama of desuetude.” Coda: as summer 2018 gasps its last, so does the Voice; mourned in September blog posts, like Schjeldahl’s for The New Yorker, it now exists only in archival form. This seems a fittingly uncharismatic parable for an East Village that has died more than once in the past thirty years or so—the end doesn’t even get to feel poignant anymore. [Read more…]