. Consider that Andrew Breitbart was a contemporary new media turn on Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Imagine either of those two dying not in the faded aftermath of their celebrity and achievements, as they were, but at the height of their notoriety. That said, I will be very surprised to read a fairer, wiser consideration […]
Everything Old is Newt Again
. I’ve taken some time off for real life this week – that oddly embodied and sensate earthly manifestation so much more vivid than Cyberlife. It’s been a trip. I kinda liked it, so – I don’t know – worldly. Still, I have received communiqués from that way station between the two worlds – political […]
CineFile – Elmer Gantry
Something about yesterday’s post made me think of the great Burt Lancaster performance in the Richard Brooks film of Sinclair Lewis‘s “Elmer Gantry.” One way or another, they’re always selling salvation. Related articles Does Perry Have an “Elmer Gantry” Problem? (politicalwire.com) Elmer Gantry and the Cult of Personality (patheos.com) CineFile – Nobody’s Fool (sadredearth.com) […]
Politics and Art
Vladimir Nabokov did not like the novel of ideas. Artists often have their idiosyncratic dislikes, contrary expressions of the unique aesthetic vision that drives their own work. Particularly, Nabokov did not like the work of those monuments of great-idea novels, Dostoyevsky and Mann, though there is no reason his distaste should have excluded the novels […]
CineFile: Mothers, Sons, & Political Paranoia
In the 1950s there really was a communist threat. It just wasn’t in the United States, even though there were surely many more American communist supporters and sympathizers then than there are Americans today who are supporters of any form of Islamism. Even then Joe McCarthy claimed that there were communists in the Pentagon, and […]