newcritics

Family movie night this week was the negligible Happily N’Ever After, a good premise done in by a script that seemed to have been written with the idea in mind that nothing was to go onto the screen that would tax the modest talents of the computer animators.  The result is kind of a [...]

You don’t have to ask Kirk Douglas for his favorite film role - it’s already on his lips. “Van Gogh.” He’s referring to Lust for Life, the 1956 MGM movie about the life of the Dutch painter, based on the 1934 novel by Irving Stone, directed by Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor, and produced by [...]

Note: Neddie Jingo wrote an excellent post about B. Kliban back in January of this year. That was my introduction to this wonderful site. I thought I’d share this bit off fluff that I wrote over at my place back in May of ‘06.

I was in the mood for some B. Kliban [...]

(Crossposted at my hovel)
An article in the latest New York Review of Books, a review of a book on the creation of the Royal Society of London, one of history’s premiere scientific bodies, had a passage that made me sit up and whinny. Under discussion is Francis Bacon:
After [Bacon's] death in 1626, his most imaginative [...]

(The first season of the regenerated Dr. Who starts tonight on WTTW, one of Chicago’s PBS stations. Check your local listings to see if it’s coming to you.)
As a child I remember stumbling upon the Doctor occasionally on PBS. (We didn’t have cable and I was (and remain) a bit of a couch [...]

I’ve long held the theory that the great deposits of metals we mine to build our cities are actually found in places where massive cities of metal once stood, and that millions of years had returned them to where we find them now.
Not that I really believe this, but I’ve always found it to be [...]

The news this week out of Baghdad is relentlessly grim. The NY Times reports that a suicide bomber killed 10 people, following the 171 who died in the capital in the deadliest day since the American-led security plan for the city took effect two months ago.
Amid the smoke and the pain and the horror, [...]

The Copyright Royalty Board voted Monday to uphold its March ruling that will change the royalty structure for online radio stations. Under the old set-up, commercial radio stations all paid a flat fee and then paid 12% of their profits (source). The new set-up will apply until 2010 and will charge a flat [...]

In honor of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer, here’s a repost of a piece I wrote back in October, when The Road seemed like a metaphor for our national trajectory. Not much has changed:
A portion of my evening reading has been keeping me up deep into the night, placing me in the uncomfortable territory between sleep and [...]

I was in NY all last week. My mother had passed away expectedly after a long bout with dementia. We got the call 12:40 AM EDT Easter Sunday. Did the 18 hour drive in a big rented van on Tuesday. Attended the wake on Wednesday, funeral Thursday. The 18 hour [...]

For a brief moment, as the Carter years slipped somnambulantly into the Reagan years, it looked like Warren Zevon was going to be a real rock star.
It was the heyday of laid back LA rock, when the Eagles were king and Linda Ronstadt was queen. And Warren Zevon was Madcap Prince Hal–a boozing good time [...]

Kurt Vonnegut proposed an alternative version of World War II glory, a writhing and brutal portrait of internal turmoil and loss and madness that manifested its horror in a seemingly charming and picaresque line: foot-soldier Billy Pilgrim had become “unstuck in time.”
Slaughterhouse-Five belongs to the rarified antiwar prose of the post-war writing generation that [...]

I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak only once, in the mid-1990s, at a packed auditorium in Gainesville, Florida. He must have delivered the speech — about the joys of trips to the post office and the human contact they bring — a hundred times before and a thousand times afterward, but he made it new [...]

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. vonnegut.com has a placeholder image of an empty birdcage with an open gate. I’d always felt that Death was a running theme in the man’s work, from the time I first cracked Slaughterhouse 5 in a high school lit class, to now, this moment when I first learned of his death.
Vonnegut [...]

(Cross-posted at The Sawpit.)

I just finished reading the new paperback edition of Ann Finkerbeiner’s 2006 non-fiction book, The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in post-war American history. Finkerbeiner dispels some of the myths surrounding this clandestine organization of brilliant scientists (including many Nobel laureates) [...]

Thursday night my brother and I went to see The Host (Gwoemul). I knew when I first read press about this movie that I would have to see this with family. My mother taught her children at an early age to love monster movies, Godzilla most of all. My brother probably inherited [...]

A NewCritics/Neddie Jingo Exclusive!
Andy Partridge, founding genius of popcraft masters XTC, has reunited with his old bandmate Barry Andrews, the leading light of Shriekback, and that band’s drummer, Martyn Barker, to create a double-CD album of entirely improvised music. “Monstrance” was released in the U.S., on Partridge’s label APE, yesterday.
The phrase “entirely improvised music” [...]

I’ve never read a Harry Potter. But JK Rowling is among my favorite living authors. I owe her a deep and simple debt - the love of reading, and literature, and story-telling that all of my children have embraced. Rowling didn’t do it all, of course; there was Seuss and Stevenson, Tolkien and Margaret Wise [...]

Any movie with that name is going to get my attention. Then I saw that the leading roles are played by Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle and that’s all it took to get onto my “must see” list. Fortunately it was on the “must see” list for the Gotham Gal and my kids too. So [...]

In my apparently unread probably because uninspired review of Blood Diamond at my place last week, I described a key scene in the movie as Hemingway-esque.  But thinking it over I think I may have been wrong to bring Hemingway into it.  I was fooled by the scene’s being a conscious visual quote from the [...]