“When Novelists Sober Up”
Casey McKinney08.05.09
Good read from Intelligent Life Magazine, an offshoot of The Economist. Like the comment by Hemingway – "he can tell when…
Clinton Works The Magic
Casey McKinney08.04.09
And the journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee are free. Well, technically they’re pardoned, but if all cartoon depictions…
The H Word
Carlos Kotkin08.04.09
When ChickenWhisperer finally meets up with BeachVixen78 via an online dating site, sparks of only a minor velocity fly. Things begin as these things do, which is to say, pleasantly. Several misunderstandings later, coitus ensues. Like many daters, ChickenWhisperer was a fan… then he had this date, and maybe developed a misgiving or two. Surprise, surprise. So will he end up burning her house down? Will she be able to tell that he did, if he indeed chooses to, in the ensuing two weeks post-date number 3? Read the story to find out. Art by Danny Jock.
The Hurt Locker
Scott Bradley08.03.09
Due to some technical difficulties, I’m a little late getting up Scott Bradley’s review of The Hurt Locker, the latest film from director Kathryn Bigelow. It’s another war movie, but unlike other war movies, The Hurt Locker is, as Bradley says, the first great Iraq war movie, putting it on par with such classics as Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. It’s high praise for Bigelow, whose work showed early promise with Near Dark before later finding an unevenness which apexed with Point Break. The Hurt Locker, which was written by war journalist Mark Boal, appears to have shone a light back on her talents.
What a motive – Kid Steals Car to Avoid Church
Casey McKinney07.31.09
What a motive – Kid Steals Car to Avoid Church
Unhealthy Appetites: Dennis Cooper’s Ugly Man
Donal Mosher07.29.09
Dennis Cooper has been exploring new narratives through novels, poetry and theater for decades now. A diamond tipped, pyscho-sexual bodynaut, he can be counted as perhaps the furthest notch along the spectrum of the historically adventurous – black cat side of – Grove Press that has included authors such as Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and the Marquis De Sade. Now with his first collection of stories on the major press Harper Perennial, Ugly Man, Cooper is not pulling any punches for a broader audience. San Francisco based filmmaker and writer Donal Mosher reviews.
Talk Show 28 with Thomas Beller, Joshua Furst, Elizabeth Graver, Dave King, and Binnie Kirshenbaum
Jaime Clarke07.29.09
Long buried in a trash heap in Georgia are most of the presidential physical fitness awards I won as a kid during the Reagan administration. Learned back then while trying to run the mile part of the test that I had asthma; still I managed to eek it out for the Gipper. When older and "punk", and a bit smashed, I took some of these and other trophies and hit them with a baseball bat over the backyard fence into the rear lot of the A & P grocery store. Ah… awards. Well in this episode of Talk Show, # 28, host Jaime Clarke talks to authors Thomas Beller, Joshua Furst, Elizabeth Graver, Dave King, and Binnie Kirshenbaum about their memories of awards, more specifically blue ribbons. Art by Danny Jock. -CM
The Invisible Dragon Redux: La Chanson de Dave
Gean Moreno07.27.09
Been a long week off, and now over at mom’s trying to catch up, but then Apocalypse Now (redux) comes on and delays the blurb, am thinking of the beauty of this film, each time seen, different elements unnoticed before twixt all the the dreamy smoke screens of colored flares, like little Roman Coppola reading Baudelaire at the French Plantation. Here, in this review by artist and critic Gean Moreno, we reexamine the meaning of beauty – Dave Hickey’s take on it, in his redux version of a book released in 1993, The Invisible Dragon. ‘To each his own chimera’ – as Baudelaire would say? This book stirred controversy before and surely will again.
