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Mark Asch
books
Review of Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
03.07.08
Worlds within words within worlds. Mark Asch tackles the infinite regression of Steven Millhauser's latest short story collection.
film
The Year the Western Returned?
01.19.08
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.
Berlin Alexanderplatz on Criterion DVD
12.07.07
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.
We've Lost Control (of the Ian Curtis Legend)
10.10.07
Anton Corbijn’s new black-and-white biopic of Ian Curtis, which opens today, has the approval of the singer’s widow, whose memoir it is based on, and the backing of numerous film critics, many of whom can still remember their first intoxicating spin of Unknown Pleasures. But Mark Asch wonders whether something doesn’t get lost when we demystify our rock icons.
music
Hallelujah and Hail Satan
04.25.08
It's not unusual for a rock musician—like Robert Johnson playing the blues—to have sympathy for the Devil. Mark Asch takes us to the crossroads, where Black Sabbath, The Mountain Goats's John Darnielle, and the Man of Wealth and Taste himself commune.