The Unsung Hero of the 1970s
There is no decade easier to make fun of than the 1960s, unless it’s the 1970s. And yet the period of roughly ten years beginning in the late 1960s saw the releases of some of the most interesting American films ever made. This was the brief, great era when major studios put movies in theaters [...]
Two More Films
Movies I saw a while ago that have stayed with me: Election, directed by Alexander Payne, 1999. Some unfortunate truths about life, seen through the lens of high school. Star student Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is the kind of person who too often comes out on top: a stranger to both self-doubt and compassion, she is [...]
Two Fierce Women, or, Cliff Shrugged
I. SUSAN SONTAG In Phillip Lopate’s wonderfully illuminating, critical but warm new book, Notes on Sontag, there is a quote that speaks for me: “As one thoughtful writer friend put it, ‘I feel as if I have one brain and she has two.’” Unlike, say, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag is not a writer I wish [...]
All This Jazz
If a person’s music collection contains one jazz record, likely as not it’s Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, from 1959. Reportedly the best-selling jazz album of all time, it still moves thousands of copies a week, and rightly so — it’s a beautiful, beautiful recording. But here are a few others that deserve some notice, picked mostly at [...]
Music to My Eyes
Can prose ever approach music? If so, I propose two novels that make the cut — one old, one new. OLD: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. The sentences have a rhythm that makes them sing: There was a wisteria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into [...]
More Along the Film Line
More wildly random thoughts along the film line (notes on books and music coming, I promise): I watch TV while using the treadmill at the Y and catch snatches of a wide assortment of movies, from the great to the abysmal. Speaking of the latter, I recently caught the end of Roadhouse — which reaffirmed my opinion [...]
