On writing
Josh Long’s review of The Trip to Italy (2014) on the website Battleship Pretension calls the film “a feast to the eyes, uproariously funny, and keenly introspective.” I’ll go along with the “feast for the eyes” here, but I can’t agree that The Trip to Italy was uproariously funny. Funny, yes. And I certainly can’t … Read more
Two articles in the Sept. 8, 2014, The Wall Street Journal are interesting when read together. 1. Grocery chains and food companies are struggling. Why? Walmart says consumers are concerned with “depressed wages and cuts in federal benefits.” Roundy’s (a mid-west grocery chain) says that the grocery and food businesses are suffering decreased profits because … Read more
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, an Iraq War veteran tells readers the answer he gives to people who ask whether that war “was worth it.” Depending on who is asking, this question might be about the veteran’s own participation, but most often it is probably about American foreign policy. Was the war worth … Read more
Like all humans, yet far more obviously than most, Ai Wei Wei exists in some indefinable middle ground between being free and being under house arrest. That is true of his life in general, but especially as he waits out probation as depicted in Ai Wei Wei: the Fake Case. In this documentary he appears … Read more
Unlike some actual film critics, I think that Blue Jasmine by Woody Allen is not a film about the 1% and 99%, even though we see two strata of society banging into each other. I believe the film is primarily about deceit. In looking at a film or play, we might ask what force or … Read more
In keeping with Ethan and Joel Coen’s dark whimsy, and their ambivalent fascination with losers and failures, Inside Llewyn Davis is a sort of reverse-image, anti-heroic Odyssey. Like Odysseus, who laboriously island-hops homeward after total war against Troy, the homeless and broke Davis moves uncomfortably from couch to couch as charitable acquaintances let him crash … Read more
Edward Snowden is another casualty, in the broadest sense of that word, of whatever Washington is now calling what used to be called the War on Terror, or the Long War. Like American soldiers and Afghan suicide bombers, Edward Snowden knew the personal risks and accepted them to serve what he considered a higher purpose. … Read more
The Napa Playhouse just completed its run of Yasmina Reza’s 2009 play, God of Carnage, and they did very well. God of Carnage might have been aptly entitled A Delicate Balance, if Edward Albee had not already used that for another play with a similar thematic interest. Albee’s play uneasily reveals the fragile, delicate balance … Read more
For poets, one of the best prophylactics against staleness and provincialism is a nice, plump anthology of poems translated from another culture. We welcome The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry and The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry in part for easing our access to a remarkably wide range of poetry arguably more … Read more
Michael Casey has once again offered his readers a collection of amusing, deceptively simple poems about daily life as a military policeman during the Viet Nam War, in Check Points, published by Gary Metras’s Adastra Press, 2011. Unlike many contemporary books of poetry (books that gather unrelated poems, loaded with enough filler to remind me … Read more