Sunday Morning! “Swing Time” by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith’s most recent novel about female friendships, identity, dance, and how we grow out of the soil in which we were planted.
Author: Rufus F.
Sunday Morning! Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” (1979)
The director angrily replied that the movie needed to be slower at the beginning so bored audience members would realize they were in the wrong theater and leave early, thus weeding them out.
Sunday Morning! Art that Everyone Should Know
Preach it! Who are the great artists that you think the world NEEDS to know about right now?
Sunday Morning! “The Golden House”
In his recent novel, Salman Rushdie shows how reinventing oneself is damned hard to pull off, even in New York.
Sunday Morning! J.G. Ballard’s Shopping Maul
Rereading J.G. Ballard’s final novel about consumers who turn to absentminded fascism when shopping loses its appeal.
Sunday! On a Vivian Maier Exhibit
If a great artist dies without ever showing the world their work, does the world have the right to see it now?
When Editors hear the Word ‘Culture’…
Todd VanDerWerff, a cultural critic and journalist, says (somewhat unsurprisingly) that we need cultural critics and journalists, a group of writers that have been let go from numerous media outlets over the past few years as all media coverage is gradually sucked into the Trump Singularity.
Scary Monsters, Super Creeps, Keep me Running
Like many, I prefer to start my days with a jolt of news-induced panic, although I couldn’t tell you why.
Book Notes: Close to the Knives: a memoir of disintegration (1991)
The harrowing memoir of a lost artist from NY reveals how multi-talented David Wojnarowicz was and how bad the good old days were.
Book Notes: French Romantic Travel Writing (2012)
I can attest that this a truly fascinating subject and book because I’ve also written a book on something very closely related.
I’m with the Brand
I’d be more optimistic about gentrification in my city if the boosters could fill in the details of their bright new future.
Book Notes: “Making Things Right” (2017)
Ole Thorstensen is a master craftsman both in carpentry and prose.
The orgastic future recedes before us
Matthew Stewart’s piece on “the 9.9 percent” in the Atlantic is more interesting (and probably easier to remember) than jeremiads about the “one percent”.
The Uses and Abuses of Donuts
How a gourmet donut shop became a battleground over gentrification, anarchism, white pride, and everything else.
The Winter in Black and White
Flophouses, Scientologists, mysterious strangers, Italian sex films, and more from the second-worst winter of my life.
“Christmas Eve” by Mike DeCapite
One of those stories where every word is the right one in the right place…
Book Notes: “The Enlightenment on Trial” (2017)
On a recent book which argues that it’s time we stop thinking of the Enlightenment as the work of caffeinated European men in salons and look to the civil courts of the Spanish colonial world.
The End of Gentrification as we Know It
Hopefully the last (possibly the first) piece you’ll ever have to read about gentrification (in Hamilton, Ontario).
Book Notes: “Disco’s Out… Murder’s In!” (2015)
Holy fishing Christ! Notes about a recent horrifying/riveting book about a murderous punk rock gang in early 80s Los Angeles.
