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Come on, compadre. Come on!
There is absolutely nothing about Point Break that is not wonderful. Even the bad parts (there are no bad parts). You can watch this movie with anyone. Your brother. Your boyfriend. Your crappy ex-boyfriend. Your friends (all friends, over twenty years of your life). Your students. Maybe not your mother. But maybe your mother-in-law. The plot…
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Silly Theory
Some years ago, I found myself at 24-hour vegetarian diner in a California college town, breakfasting with a dear friend. We had ordered coffee, but the main course was psychoanalysis. “You can’t read Lacan without Hegel,” I assured her earnestly. She broke into a grin, paused for a brief, dramatic moment, and then sang my…
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Love in the Ruins: or, Should I Go To Grad School?
On a late-spring day sometime in the mid-90s, I found myself sitting with a friend on a stone bench overlooking a prospect of conventional, but nevertheless pretty estimable, pastoral loveliness: green valley and distant hills, cinematic cloudscapes, placid lake, etc. The friend with whom I sat was just then at the collapsing end of a…
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Brazil’s Untergang
For commentators on TV networks around the world, human speech was truly a cracked tin kettle Tuesday; if they weren’t expressing their utter disbelief, they were just being silent, gaping at the nothingness of the unprecedented. They didn’t know what to say because they didn’t believe what they were seeing. Not that there was anything…
3
I See Dead People
At The Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, the dead fill every nook and cranny. “Art of Mourning,” the current exhibit, features celluloid medallions and Victorian-era memorial photographs depicting the waxy, masklike faces of the dead. In “Sleeping Beauty” photos, deceased little girls and boys are cradled in open caskets or propped up in rocking chairs,…
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Pop Politics
If I hum a few bars, you might begin to recall the tune. It goes like this. In August 1970, a warrant was issued for Angela Davis’s arrest. Two guns she’d legally owned and registered turned up in a courtroom shoot out a week before, and this disgraced philosophy professor, doubtful of getting a fair…
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“Like a Wedding”
A confession: I had never been to a gay wedding before my own. Another: a gay wedding turns out to be pretty much the same as a straight one. That realisation didn’t come as a total surprise, but it did come with another, one more visceral and unexpected. Namely, that the struggle for same-sex marriage…
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Kanye West Presents: Dune
On June 18th, Alejandro Jodorowsky released, via twitter, this picture. It is our hope that as a result of this meeting, Kanye West may have been convinced that Dune is the ultimate in artistic achievement. Perhaps, like Jodoworosky, West will not need to read the book to understand Herbert’s vision and the world of Arrakis. Perhaps he will be…
1
Quiet Days in Malibu
Artists have been trailed out of the box canyons north of Los Angeles by enemies, real or imagined, for decades. Jules Amthor, Chandler’s sociopathic psychic, cornered Phillip Marlow in one of these canyons. Joan Didion haunted the curves of the PCH in her white corvette and Neil Young was pursued by an army of mutant…
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“A filthy process in which I was engaged”: Revising Frankenstein
Terror, nausea, and the solitary slog of patching together cold, dead bodies in the workshop: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus created a fantastical, searing metaphor for the horrors of revision, that process by which writers try, fail, and try again to animate the corpses of their ideas. Yet it is Shelley’s—and Victor Frankenstein’s—dazzling…
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Ramona at Forty
I always knew Beverly Cleary was a great writer. I read every single one of her books growing up — even the lesser-discussed ones like Otis Spofford and Ellen Tebbits with all the angst over something called “long underwear” that was mystifying to me as a kid in the 80s. I read most of them…