July 2010
24 posts
3 tags
1 tag
Andy Warhol: Blow Job →
“In this important book, the influential film-maker and writer Peter Gidal shows how Blow Job is a film about film, about time and also about mortality. Gidal places Blow Job within a history of works by artists, including Duchamp and Velázquez, that directly affect the viewer, enacting a pattern of recognition and loss that constitutes the experience of perception itself.”
On the advantages of having a brother in law...
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m in the basement working on the moot court paper.”
“Oh, cool. Can you do me a favor?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to get me a PDF or a print-out or whatever of John Limon’s ‘The Shame of Abu Ghraib.’ Critical Inquiry has it locked behind a pay-wall.”
...
Valinor, the American MFA
On the phone with the program director this evening, I’d meant to ask if he was related to Claude Lévi-Strauss, revolutionary anthropologist, or Levi Strauss, revolutionary jeans manufacturer.
I’ve been accepted into a course of study, anyway; an MFA in art criticism and writing. If I find the funds I will go. If I do not find the funds, I will go into the West, like Galadriel. That...
1 tag
Friday Night Lights: Seidel, Stein and Lorentzen
My radical Virilio postulate: sometimes the internet is your boyfriend, or a boyfriend. You regurgitate its worth into his ear, the ear of flesh, when you’re too full. Like a momma-bird. You weep together like doves. You use pheonix tears as lube. Bird metaphors are libidinal. Virilio lacks sex; I’m correcting that.
What follows is my radical shill.
Cody is in Georgetown tonight...
Sadness for Umpires
fairest:
I saw on a thankfully mute television today ESPN, The Worldwide Leader in Sports, dissecting an umpire snafu that befell a Dodger’s pitcher last night. Up came the slick graphic screens designed by Risdee fratboys, with the language copy written by the douchebags of Brown, with the sportscasters in their monkey suits who would be doing more for the common good if they were at GS trading...
WatchThe kittens in the barn have learned to walk around. They hide in the back under old desks. My haircut is awesome. A.J.—they’re all accounted for.
5 tags
Caleb Crain continues to write about movies.
TRAUMDEUTUNG AT THE MOVIES
We’re safe!
I went to The Paris Review website to read Elif Batuman’s account of a 12 hour Dostoyevsky theatre experience—a blind date? did she break up with Max? I didn’t actually make it to the post; update to follow—but lingered over the large image from Inception. I scrolled down a bit. I’ve read a lot on the film already; I...
Todd Solondz Returns With Life During Wartime →
J. Hoberman, whom I adore (his essay “21st Century Cinema: Death and resurrection in the Desert of the (New) Real” appeared in the December 2009 issue of ArtForum, where among other Baudrillardian hesitancies, he proposed: “Did the history changing shock of 9/11 plunge the nascent twenty-first century into an alternate universe—or reveal a new reality?”; amazing), recently wrote this:
...
2 tags
Full of Light and Grace
marginalgloss:
I wrote something on Minority Report for BWDR partly because I haven’t contributed in many moons and partly because the redoubtable and most like-worthy duckbeater made me do it.
Above is a sneaky preview in the form of some notes I made while rewatching it, which (for the keen eyed scrubbers amongst you) does include one key moment in the film that I forgot to mention in...
Meditation on Failure
Aren’t you the pathetic animal?
A long time ago
when Earth was a fly
fizzing in an inkwell, smiling,
they came for you, too,
and cut off your feet.
First Listen: The Books, 'The Way Out' by SAMI... →
“Now, five years later, The Books’ new album The Way Out stays true to form by sculpting formless arrangements and once again capturing the imagination. Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong have developed tremendously as producers: The diversity of moods on The Way Outshows the clear maturation in the pair’s tastes. Using exercises in autogenics to start and finish the album — at one...
Aurora Floyd
fairest:
I saw a woman on the train this morning reading Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in the World Classic’s Edition. The cover shows dark and rustic Aurora Floyd (presumably) reclining against a friendly horse the way someone today might curl up with their PowerBook in a warm den.
I wanted to say to the woman it’s not every day you see someone on the train reading Mary Elizabeth...
From a Letter to Allison, Wherein I Discuss My...
Because his vision is so bad, my grandfather insists on keeping his eyes shock-wide open. This has the unintentional effect of making him look owlish, and more wise than usual. The bloody bandages on his arms and leg give him this preciousness, however, this childishness without the vitality.
Grandpa told me last night that he has decided not to continue with the chemo therapy—”Quality...
Poets—they aren't going to make the evening news,... →
I had the opportunity years ago to interview the magisterial poet John Balaban, and the link above connects to the full interview on the Valparaiso Poetry Review website.
Bryson: When you were reading off the names, I felt it was a small assault on this generation — on quiet Americans sitting around complacently while there’s a war going on overseas. I was wondering, what the role of a poet —...
Predator Bait →
Fraught short fiction over at n+1.
Are Wesley Yang and Molly Yung the only two Asians regularly contributing to n+1?
Christopher Hsu writes for Paper Monument. Close!
The editorial board of The Point is seemingly transnational, the contributors mudbloods. Harry Potter 6 trailers are looking shrill and tearful, Voldemort sings and has a bad nose.
What is it about After All magazine that...
a bright wall in a dark room.: Thrashing Blindly... →
by Evan Bryson
[L]est we forget: The Village was released in the summer of 2004. If it would not promise democracy’s futurity―least of all the Democratic party’s―than at least it could provide a little guidance as to living in this day, in this war-dumb country, in this new bogus century where god was nowhere to be found.
That’s what she said.
Translated from the German
I have a generically ambitious essay up at A Bright Wall in a Dark Room about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, a troubling film, a stupid film, a meaningful film. Doesn’t everyone miss when Marginal Gloss regularly contributed?
And here is a picture of my brother Todd in a small wagon pulled by a Jeep, in a small-town Fourth of July parade, on the state-line of Indiana/Ohio:
Did...
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M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender: Based on...
I wouldn’t be surprised if Shyamalan uses Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will as his pump-up film before he goes into production. “I will defeat fascism,” he says. “I will defeat fascism. I will defeat fascism.” He is a very sincere artist—like dear Leni—and hopes to solve the world’s ills with glorious filmmaking. But I believe he has lost his way.
...
