Movies: Back to the Future, I & II
When I was a kid, I videotaped Back to the Future II off HBO and watched it again and again and again. I had only seen the original movie once, and even then probably missed the opening sequence,...
View ArticleDance: The Music of David Lang Interpreted at the Guggenheim's Works and Process
I saw this show six weeks ago, but haven't yet forgotten my surprise that two pieces of music by the same composer—the so-called laws of nature and forced march by David Lang—could be so different. The...
View ArticleMovies: Howl
I have the greatest respect for the intention and ensuing construction of this film: the elucidation of Ginsberg's poem Howl through biography and history, but multiple complaints about its...
View ArticleDance: Voices and Dance within the Americas, at the Guggenheim's Works and...
This night, the Guggenheim presented three short pieces by three different choreographers: one American (though his biography describes Jonah Bokaer as "an international choreographer") and two Cubans,...
View ArticleBooks: In Search of Lost Time Volume Four: Cities of the Plain, by Marcel Proust
I was expecting, since the more recent Modern Library version of this volume is entitled Sodom & Gomorrah rather than the innocuous Cities of the Plain, that this would be the book in which Marcel...
View ArticleMovies: Batman Begins and The Dark Knight
When The Dark Knight came out and everyone was talking about it, I refused to see it. It was a sequel, and I hadn't seen the first movie. In fact, I had never seen a Batman movie, or any comic book...
View ArticleMovies: Primer
Shane Carruth only needed $7,000 and a few years to give us the headache-inducing Primer; perhaps the process gave him a headache as well, because he hasn't given us another film since. Of course,...
View ArticleMovies: Burlesque
I'm not ashamed to admit it: I am a girl, and I am thus the target audience for this film. Even if I consider myself an aloof intellectual, too critical for television and bubble-gum pop, there is...
View ArticleMovies: Salt
There was a time when I would pay to see Angelina Jolie movies in the theatre, even though I knew they would be awful, just for the privilege of basking in her glow. But Angelina has changed. Her...
View ArticleMovies: A Fish Called Wanda
When I was a kid, there were two movies that I was drawn to every time we went to the video store to rent a movie: Sex, Lies, and Videotape, for the promise of titillation behind its cover photo of...
View ArticleMovies: Get Low
Get Low is basically a Cohen brothers' film that wasn't made by the Cohen brothers. A cranky old hermit in an old Western town gets the notion into his head that he wants to have a funeral party—now,...
View ArticleMovies: Going the Distance
Another airplane movie, Going the Distance was chosen from a selection of forty-something films solely for the reason that, one day when I was volunteering at the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, a...
View ArticleMovies: Cyrus
I am shallow; I did not enjoy watching this film because I cannot stand John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill. They depress me. They are not funny. They are sad. Looking at them makes me sad. Listening to them...
View ArticleMovies: Sex, Lies, & Videotape
As a child, when we went to the video store to rent a movie, I would wander the aisles of VHS boxes and wonder about certain films, like Sex, Lies, and Videotape. I imagined it was very bad, and of...
View ArticleBooks: In Search of Lost Time Volume Five: The Captive, by Marcel Proust
Proust’s “captive” is Albertine, whom he has somehow coerced into moving into his parents' flat with him (while his parents are away; the only person privy to this secret resident is the nosy...
View ArticleBooks: In Search of Lost Time Volume Six: The Fugitive
After finishing Cities of the Plain, alternately titled Sodom and Gomorrah, and finding that Proust had yet to acknowledge his homosexuality, I expected that he would do so in The Fugitive. I imagined...
View ArticleBooks: In Search of Lost Time Volume Seven: Time Regained, by Marcel Proust
It took me eight months, but I have read all of it.Time Regained is a volume very different from Proust's others. First, the narrators steps, for a moment, outside of his interior world of intimate...
View ArticleDance: Alvin Ailey at City Center
Alvin Ailey has long been my favorite dance company. I like to say that when God created man, he created Ailey dancers; certainly, this is humanity achieving its full genetic potential, at least so far...
View ArticleMovies: The Mission
My Jesuit high school must have done a far better job of indoctrinating me than I thought at the time, because I found this film incredibly upsetting. Set in 18th Century South America, the story poses...
View ArticleBooks: Airships, by Barry Hannah
After finishing Proust, I thought that this book of short stories by Southern "writer's writer" Hannah would be a good antidote. And it did its duty in that it was blunt, masculine, and violent. The...
View ArticleBooks: How It Is, by Samuel Beckett
As an additional antidote to eight months of Proust, I chose Samuel Beckett. There is enough that I want to read that I don't usually reread anything, but I was describing How It Is, which I read for a...
View ArticleMovies: Black Swan
I worry about Darren Aronofsky. It seems that each of his movies culminates with the protagonist cutting him or herself apart to relieve whatever endemic psychosickness lurks inside. I worry that some...
View ArticleMovies: The Social Network
Not being particularly interested in Facebook (though I have a profile on it), or any form of living life online (despite the blogging—really, I see no discrepancy there), I had no drive to see The...
View ArticleBooks: Molly, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, by Samuel Beckett
Wary of another series, but hungering for something direct and raw after eight months of Proust’s ornate, insubstantial machinations, I sought my savior in Beckett. Only the desperate go to Beckett for...
View ArticleMusic: itsnotyouitsme at The Stone on December 2, 2010
itsnotyouitsme comprises Caleb Burhans and Grey McMurray on violin and guitar with lots of wires and electronic doo-dads. This night, they played an hour of ambient chamber music, accompanied by singer...
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