6.

In the next scene, a razor slices through a moon, dragging inch by inch across its icy surface.  This is the simplest scene in the film taken in medium long shot. That is in relation to the moon meaning that it is extremely long shot for objects… Read full post »

Calvary dates its first burial to 1848, yet while it is nearly as old as the garden-style cemeteries of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, and Trinity Cemetery in Manhattan, its constituents have always been working class and its layout is therefore less el

… Read full post »

How many serious books can even a dedicated reader conquer in a year? No more than forty, I should think. Twice that, maybe, for a professional critic, academic, or journalist who is going at it hammer and tongs.

But the late Susan Sontag claimed at the age of fifty-nine that she’d

… Read full post »

Made up of two collections, each with its own title (Snowflake and different streets), that have been bound together back to back, Eileen Myles’s most recent book of poems reads like lists that consist of haphazard associations, terse formulations and sparsely punctuated lines. This style h… Read full post »

Hollie Stevens (January 4, 1982 – July 3, 2012), American pornographic actress, “Queen of Clown Porn,” has passed away. [SF Weekly | Wikipedia]

Bees can ‘turn back time,’ reverse brain aging.

When we observe other people we attribute their behavior to their character… Read full post »

The venue was crammed. People were jostling for position on the floor, on the stairs. The crowd was overwhelmingly young, interspersed with a few visible Hungarian emigrés (elderly, formally dressed, disgruntled at the mob scene) and one or two poorly groomed men carrying those bulging, fain

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This is dark camp, nostalgic kitsch repurposed by a generation whose thefts seemed premised on the canny awareness that anything original they create could be stolen. But don’t confuse Ocean’s approach for postmodern pastiche or retromania, despite his affection for old cars and the vocal

… Read full post »

Read (And See) More | “Stockton Goes Bust” | Susie Cagle | ᔥBoston Review Read full post »

Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet, critic, and professor Dan Beachy-Quick. Dan barely needs a formal laureled introduction, which I am never prone to giving in this space anyway. Instead I offer a personal one. When I was… Read full post »

In June, a company I work with flew me out to Amsterdam, ostensibly to create art about the city. But the artists in Dam Square could watercolor a sweeter canal than me. Instead, I drew people. Escorts and porn filmmakers and digital rights activists and women who co-built artspaces in abandoned… Read full post »

Chumbawamba’s early ideology was influenced in no small part by the pioneering British anarcho-punk band Crass. Their stitched-together ideological tapestry involved pacifism, veganism, squatting houses and organizing benefit concerts. Unlike the humorless, puritanical Crass, Chumbawamba approache

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But had we devised independently at least the more practical sorts of inventions, this could not but have had profound influence upon the conduct of our everyday lives, and even upon government, religion, art, and business. —Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (1933)

Over 40 years of… Read full post »

“Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things…. nose painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire but takes away the performance.” — Macbeth Act 2, Scene 3 Read full post »

What’s going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head…
Radio lab: Radioactive beauty products, for real, back in the day. Isn’t it fantastic that we now have laws and stringent federal regulations against putting pois… Read full post »

If you look at the governing boards of private universities like Harvard or Swarthmore, for example, you’ll find that along with bankers and developers, there is also critical mass of alumni, public servants and academics, and that the board’s fundamental agenda tends to be maintaining co

… Read full post »

I suppose most girls remember when they became aware of themselves as specifically female viewers. Growing up in the eighties, I watched movies about boys and girls with equal relish, empathizing with the protagonists and getting totally absorbed in story without my parts getting consciously… Read full post »

Of all the Trollope novels I’ve read (and, God help me, I’ve read at least 20), The Vicar of Bullhampton (1869-70) is perhaps the oddest. Its story lines are very loosely tied together, with a murder investigation taking a backseat to the gripping legal drama over whether a… Read full post »

Drugs are the perfect consumer product. Almost always expensive, they are useless beyond their consumption, the very fact of which is total: once smoked, snorted, eaten, or drunk, they’re gone. In the moment of their purchase, not only do we exchange cash for an object exclusively for pleas… Read full post »

Mirror Me, Annika Connor

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while may remember last year’s month without mirrors, a project that brought on a monthlong wash of serenity. So serene was I during that time, in fact, that I decided I’d make it an annual event for… Read full post »

More than the pacing, antic tapir, more than the dancing bear did visitors to the Jardin des Plantes love Castor and Pollux, the two elephants held captive there. Brother and sister (twins, in fact), Castor and Pollux never ceased to delight onlookers. Ladies marveled at the delicacy with whi… Read full post »

4.

It is a very comic scene involving the police and a criminal. It seems they have caught the criminal before the scene even started. In an iris-out from black the criminal is shown in medium-long shot toward the left part of the screen. The criminal is in front of… Read full post »

FEI announces that cloned horses can compete in international competitions.

No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.

Survey: 25% of Female Facebook Users Admit to Posting Unflattering Photos of Friends on Purpose.

International timekeepers added a second to the clock at midnight… Read full post »

We have always been at war with our emotions. When we’ve been at our most uncertain, machines carried us through to safety. Hysteria is the commonest way to describe a loss of control over one’s emotions, and its diagnosis has, not coincidentally, been applied to women far more common… Read full post »

Soon the whole bridge was trembling and resounding. The uncouth faces passed him two by two, stained yellow or red or livid by the sea, and as he strove to look at them with ease and indifference, a faint stain of personal shame and commiseration rose to his

… Read full post »