45 More Stories by Donald Barthelme
Brian Howe01.24.08
You’d think for the latest collection from Donald Barthelme, the man who left us the sets 60 Stories and 40 Stories, he might have settled on an even medium of 50 stories, but alas, never predictable (and dead, so obviously not making these decisions), gives up his ghost again in a new collection just 5 short of mathematical balance. Fitting for a writer whose sentences of anal algebra glean amidst an illusion of sweet anarchy (that makes no sense, I am all blurbed out). Brian Howe reviews Flying to America: 45 More Stories, Turkish delight for the Barthelme completist. Cover image of B. by Danny Jock.
The Year the Western Returned?
Mark Asch01.19.08
Mark Asch takes a look back through 2007 – a year that found filmakers producing perhaps an inordinate amount of neo-Westerns – then decides whether or not they live up to the the standards of the classics. Seems many missed their mark, nevertheless a few have now cleaned house at the Oscars.
Film Poll 2007
The Fanzine12.31.07
Welcome to the first annual Fanzine year-end Film Poll. Don’t expect to find Oscar nominees, sleeper hits, or good taste in this survey. This is strictly about our love of movies. Contributors include Benjamin Strong, Mark Asch, Samantha Culp, Kevin Killian, Michael Louie, and Nancy Keefe Rhodes.
Berlin Alexanderplatz on Criterion DVD
Mark Asch12.07.07
Long unavailable on these shores, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s monumentous Berlin Alexanderplatz super-sizes the defining obsessions of a prodigious career. Criterion’s long-awaited DVD box is your one-stop shop for decaying social structures, sexual opportunism, and righteous, bracing aesthetics; Mark Asch breaks it down.
Interview with Roger Warren Beebe
Nancy Keefe Rhodes12.06.07
Filmmaker Roger Warren Beebe believes experimental movies are for the masses, and to prove it he led an avant-garde roadshow across the States. Nancy Keefe Rhodes talks with the director about his tour and the varieties of non-commercial filmmaking.
Imprints 5: Tom Perrotta, Gay Talese, Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne
Zach Baron11.15.07
In Zach Baron’s 5th Imprints, a monthly books column, his theme is sex, and as a befitting follow up to Mailer, it tends towards the macho, then twists back to the humorously male deprecating. Included in the review is Gay Talese’s classic Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne’s The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film, and a new one by "lapsed Roman Catholic" Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher, a novel which pits the prurient against the pious in a high school setting.
Supergroup in Reverse: The Afterlife of cLOUDDEAD
Ben Bush11.13.07
Ben Bush tracks the big bangish explosion of what was once a taut singularity, the eclectic hip hop supergroup cLOUDDEAD, and the future of its former mates Yoni Wolf, David Madson, and Adam Drucker. Bush argues that the music that has followed in the aftermath is a heap more complex and interesting than the original structure.
Staring Back at Chris Marker
Andy Beta11.04.07
"Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future," wrote T.S. Eliot. No filmmaker has absorbed this vertiginous lesson better than cult documentarist Chris Marker. Apropos of the long-awaited DVD release of two Marker classics, and a new book of his photographs, Andy Beta explores intertextual connections that reach across decades.
Review of Zeroville by Steve Erickson
Scott Bradfield10.25.07
Steve Erickson, in his latest novel Zeroville, invents a character who chooses to live his life as if he were a cinematic character. And who wouldn’t? In the movies, one can jump cut, laws of cause and effect are easily manipulated, and responsibility becomes malleable or mute. The problem for Erickson’s hero however, Scott Bradfield explains, is that he’s unknowingly driven by the causal concerns of his deft creator, Erickson the novelist. And all that drives Erickson, drives his characters…well, read and see.
Ignition, Orbit & Landfall: A Liars Synopsis
Brian Howe10.18.07
Brian Howe writes the LP narrative thus far of one of Brooklyn’s defining bands, Liars, a group defined by their undefinable music. Liars (now spread between L.A. and Berlin) are starting to make some sense. With a driving, almost pop-oriented new album that’s more coherent than anything they’ve done prior, Liars have once again fooled us all. What’s in that name anyway, Liars? Has it ever sounded so sweet?
