newcritics

According to the previews, tonight’s episode brings the Nixon account to the fore at Sterling Cooper - the account being the 1960 presidential campaign of Richard Milhous Nixon, the bright young Vice-President from California. Widely viewed as the first mass media election in U.S. history, the Kennedy-Nixon race was fought on television and on a [...]

Item: I’ve decided against a military career. It’s too hard on poor front page editors. Though when something goes wrong their indignation doesn’t extend to construction workers and others who die on the job. And yet they’ll desperately call the cops of whom dozens get killed each year, should their own house get blown up. [...]

I visited East-Berlin a few years after the wall came down, the moral stench still there, you could feel it, almost touch it, caked into ugly buildings everywhere. In Britain you practically need an act of Parliament to detain deeply suspicious, self-proclaimed enemies of the State beyond a couple of weeks. On the other hand, [...]

Most of the characters in Claire Messud’s lush and vicious fourth novel, The Emporer’s Children, are funny, bright, entitled New Yorkers - and they’re all fairly horrible human beings. You recognize them, you walk along with them, but you don’t sympathize. And why would you? The “emporer” of the title is lordly literary genius Murray [...]

Every once in awhile, when The Shamus is in a ruminatin’ mood, he likes to pull down from the shelf the colorful oral musings of Mr. Ulysses Everett McGill, the disgraced lawyer, Parchman Farm convict, old-timey singer, dedicated Dapper Dan user, a damn paterfamilias and a man with the capacity for abstract thought, although he [...]

When Imperial Teen opened for The Breeders in 2002 they caused quite a sensation. The San Francisco indie-pop band nearly stole the show at Irving Plaza. Lucky for the Deal sisters that John Cameron Mitchell made a special appearance on stage that night.
After a five year hiatus from recording and touring, Jone Stebbins, Roddy [...]

I like television with episode titles. Titles give support to the themes of specific shows within larger story arcs. They can be very straightforward, like “Evan” of Miami Vice, or more editorial, like “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run” from its season 2. They can be playful, like the Remington Steele titles that all used [...]

I took a mini-vacation last week, and for once I chose not to do battle with the big bluefish off Cape May or to stride manfully into each of the Atlantic City casinos in turn, clad in my finest white dinner jacket and breaking their baccarat banks one by one. No, this time I stayed [...]

The news today is that even reading has been politicized. A new poll finds one of every four Americans has not cracked a book in the past year, and that leads to a brouhaha about whether conservatives or liberals are the most avid readers.
Former Democratic Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, now president of the American Association of [...]

An hour ago I would have said my week couldn’t get any worse. I would have been sorely mistaken.
Terrible news: The great Grace Paley, feminist, activist, and until today one of our best living short story writers, has died. Leora Skolkin-Smith (whose fiction Paley created an imprint to publish) sent word in email. [...]

Slammer! is a new musical about women in prison written by Chan Chandler and Steve Adams which premiered Monday night, the 20th of August, at the FringeNYC theater festival.
My participation in the birth of Slammer! began two years ago when Chan walked into Smoke and Mirrors with a song called ‘Solitary’. Chan became a [...]

Steely Dan. Just hearing the name conjures up all sorts of superlatives in my mind. Fantastic songs with interesting and unique chords and chord progressions, lush and expansive arrangements, slick yet inspired instrumentation, immaculate state-of-the art recordings , literate, obtuse and hilarious lyrics (often derisive, ironic and even sarcastic character studies [...]

(Cross-posted at The Sawpit.)
Since the recent death of Swedish director Igmar Bergman, I’ve been thinking of his many films I’ve seen over the years. The one that still haunts me today is his 1961 Academy Award winner, The Virgin Spring. I first saw it twelve years ago, shortly after being laid off from my print [...]

I have been listening to Superfly, the movie soundtrack album by Curtis Mayfield, since it was released in 1972, and loving it every time I hear it. The album tells a gritty, bittersweet story that I have imagined, start to finish, countless times in my head. A Harlem cocaine dealer tries to “get over,” and [...]

Last night we attended the most upsweeping, coolest, most thrilling live jazz show I’ve had the joy to get captivated by in ages. Archie Shepp’s tenor sax carries the old-school sweetness you hear in classics by Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. His tone is that mellifluous but his performance is wild, ecstatic, and a political [...]

When Max Roach was on the bandstand, it always seemed like he was the smartest guy in the room.
Roach, who died Thursday at 83, carried his intelligence as dignity, not conceit. It was displayed in a CV that everyone watching him knew, a CV characterized by restless innovation and, yes, a degree in composition [...]

“With Summer TV this Good, Who Needs Fall?” asks the TV Addict. And I’d answer: me. I’m looking forward to the new season, and hoping against hope that House will be less formulaic. I think the summer season is vastly overrated - I’m don’t care for John from Cincy, except to see old Deadwood actors [...]

Back in my salad days, a good measure of how much you loved your friends was how long you could stand to be around them when they were stoned.
For me, though, the tougher test came before the first joint was lit, sometimes hours before, at that moment when someone let it be known that there [...]

Watched a rather odd double feature over the weekend: Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim and Steven Okazaki’s White Light Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a random pairing, as I came across Okazaki’s film on HBO while channel-surfing, and the wife brought home Hartley’s sequel to Henry Fool from the library. Although [...]

Sometimes I think that the problem with TV shows and books and movies is that writers write them. The very fact that a writer is doing the writing casts a heavy pall of dubiety upon the enterprise from the get-go.
Ladies and gentlemen, presented for your consideration: Californication, premiering tonight on Showtime right after the season [...]

In the year of our Lord eighteen-hundred and six
we set sail from the cold quay of Cork
We were sailing away with a cargo of bricks
for the Grand City Hall in New York
The scene is a smoke filled room, men - old to my 3 year old eyes- stand around a pool table, whiskeys in hand, [...]

The Shamus watched Elvis Presley’s King Creole last night, or as my inner auteurist might put it, Michael Curtiz’ “King Creole.” It’s pretty sad that I’ve seen Clambake and Spinout and Harum Scarum, but never Elvis’s best movie.
Last year, as the annual Aug. 16 Elvis death date approached, I watched Jailhouse Rock. In that film, [...]

Heat. Serrrrious heat. Heavy sultry steamy air. Beads of sweat luxuriating down the small of the back, bodies crushed together—
It’s another August day in the New York subway.
But Thursday night, it’s also part of a repressed tension just beneath the sleek, cool, color-saturated landscape on AMC. Mad Men is the perfect deep summer escapist [...]

The Beasties make party. Party is their product, and there was a great one going on at Summer Stage Wednesday night. After a day like Wednesday, it was a gift beyond measure.
The day started badly and then it got worse. It was a bad day for a great many New Yorkers. I was blessed, however, [...]

When the Rolling Stones lost Mick Taylor, they lost that special sauce that made the recipe just perfect. Ron Woods is ok. Brian Jones was better. But Mick Taylor was something entirely different. When Mick Taylor was in the band, The Rolling Stones were the greatest rock band ever. Period.
Mick Taylor was a force in [...]

Like any good American I have spent a vast portion of my pathetic life planted in front of a TV set watching crap.
But on the other hand I’ve gone long stretches in which I didn’t own a TV or didn’t have cable (which in downtown Philadelphia means you don’t watch TV); I used to [...]

What the hell is a Hallow?
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Didn’t that title bother anyone? It’s one of the most widely known books on the planet now, and the title has a word that I doubt many people can define.
And shouldn’t it be “deadly” hallows? “Deathly” sounds wrong there.
I wanted to see [...]

Obituaries for film directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman hailed them as cinematic giants. Bergman was called “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera” who brought “metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen.” Antonioni, we were told, “challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on [...]

Once upon a time in the west - and in gritty noir backlots - rough and ready men carried guns, drank hard liquor, and made violence a part of their daily lot. That’s the way they were portrayed, at least. And the idea of “real men” inhabiting a cushy mid-town Manhattan office building was a [...]