Reviews

Rob Nilsson and Cine Manifest at Anthology Film Archives

01.22.10

This week (Jan 21. through the 28th) at New York City’s Anthology Film Archive come the films of award winning director Rob Nilsson and Cine Manifest, San Francisco’s 1970s Marxist film collective. Nancy Keefe Rhodes gives an exhaustive yet breathless preview of the films screened at AFA. But even if you aren’t in New York, you can get many on Netflix, from your favorite indie movie store, or buy them from the source; so read up, watch, and learn how Nilsson, the octogenarian everyman, demurs his stance over time, favoring art over politics.

Theater: Gisèle Vienne and Dennis Cooper’s ‘Jerk’

Casey McKinney

01.18.10

French theater director ‘Gisèle Vienne’s Jerk is based on the chilling text of Dennis Cooper, an author deemed "the most dangerous…

Film: Aristide and the Endless Revolution

Casey McKinney

01.14.10

First of all donate to the American Red Cross and PIH if you want to help the victims of the devastating earthquake in Haiti (but ignore the texting…

The Last Station – Love, Copyright and Anarcho-Christianity

Amy Meyerson

01.14.10

It seems that L. Ron Hubbard wasn’t the only writer to create a bizarre and zealous spiritual organization. In the later part of his life, Leo Tolstoy began a radical ascetic pacifist Christian movement. He swapped letters with Gandhi, advocated for anarchist zoologist Peter Kropotkin and extolled the values of Esperanto. Director Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station offers a view on the last days of Tolstoy’s life and the dispute over the ownership of the literary estate between his wife and his followers. While the film maintains a tight focus on its pair of lovers, Amy Meyerson offers insight into the historical events that loom just outside the frame. Starring Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren and Paul Giamatti, the film is based on a novel by literary critic Jay Parini, who having contemplated the influence of an author after their eventual departure in his writing, has perhaps appropriately been appointed literary executor to Gore Vidal.

The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton

Aaron Nielsen

01.11.10

The suicide rate among queer youth is twice to four times that of their heterosexual counterparts depending on your source, and perhaps concern for that population formed the root of Kathryn Stockton’s inquiry into the depiction of queer children in literature and film. But to take on such a project is inevitably to tangle with our social construction of childhood and its very problematic relationship to sexuality. Stockton, an intellectually fearless English literature professor at the University of Utah and a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, relies on a fascinating array of texts including Georges Bataille, Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Supreme Court cases, Virginia Woolf, William Blake and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Aaron Nielsen, a contributor to Dennis Cooper’s Userlands anthology reviews.

Best of 2009, Musically Speaking

Mark Gluth

12.29.09

Seems Limewire might have been a darling again in 2009, but If you could actually afford to buy any music this year, here are some of the best albums you might have grabbed up as suggested by Mark Gluth, resident of the PANW (Pacific Northwest as he explained to us) and author of the awesome new novella The Late Works of Margaret Kroftis. From Sunset Rubdown to Sunn O))) here we go…

Impossible Princess by Kevin Killian

Jesse Hudson

12.28.09

Just in time for ‘Best Of’ lists, 2009 has been a hell of a year for writer Kevin Killian. Heck, he’s been blowing up this whole decade with some of the sharpest, wittiest, and most prodigious work of any writer in American Letters (though you still might find a lot of his words freely given in reviews on Amazon.com). As a San Franciscan for many years, it’s fitting that Killian’s latest collection of stories – Impossible Princess, one that mixes out-of-print material with new, darkly mature tales of desire and danger – is out on City Lights, the imprint that has defined the San Francisco lit scene for over half a century. Jesse Hudson reviews.

The Show That Smells by Derek McCormack

Jamie Gadette

12.16.09

Derek McCormack explained himself in a special guest post on author Dennis Cooper’s blog: “The Show That Smells – this is what carnies and circus folk call an animal show. It’s also what I named my new novel." The second installment of a planned trilogy that began with The Haunted Hillbilly and the latest in Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery imprint at Akashic, McCormack’s sartorial fantasy is an appropriately seamless blend of vampires, country music and acclaimed fashion designers. McCormack has been a contributor to The Fanzine since its infancy and interested readers might also enjoy his fashion columns on the history of the sequin, Santa costumes and tragic Hollywood costume designer Vera West. Jamie Gadette, music editor of Salt Lake’s City Weekly, reviews.

Book: Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, The Indie Label That Got Big And Stayed Small

The Fanzine

12.07.09

After 20 years of hard work, dedication, and a lot of pogoing to powerpop ballads (the cover of this book appropriately just shows Mac McCaughan and…

Art: Joseph Beuys: The Multiples at LACMA