Things Done Changed

By Armond White

Ten years ago Armond White surveyed the state of “the movies” and film criticism in his "First of the Month" piece, “Things Done Changed: The McDonald’s Theory of Moviegoing.” White began with a quote from Pauline Kael’s classic 1968 essay, “Trash, Art and the Movies” – “Can one demonstrate that trash desensitizes us, that it prevents people from enjoying something better, that it limits our range of aesthetic response?” – and he came back to Kael’s essay in the body of his article, explaining how her premises had been “undermined.”... Continue reading "Things Done Changed"


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Unwritten Rules

By Benj DeMott

It’s been an elegiac time for our crew lately. In the past year, we lost (among others) Hans Koning, Ellen Willis, George Trow, Kurt Vonnegut and, a year before that, Benjamin DeMott. They were First readers as well as writers for our tab. You could count on them to give it to you straight and there were occasions when one of their opinions could outweigh all others due to its cogency. There are no substitutes for irreplaceable elders but we’ll try to sustain what they valued in First by finding new originals to help carry us into the future. Which, sorry to repeat myself, remains unwritten (despite the chorus of that slack Natasha Bedingfield song). Continue reading "Unwritten Rules"


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First of the Year: 2008 here.


Modernity, Morality and Mimesis

By Michael Lydon

From many autobiographical passages in the Gulag volumes, and the portraits of Nerzhin and Kotoglotov, the Solzhenitsyn characters of The First Circle and Cancer Ward, emerges the story of a man who slowly grasped the truth of equality through a long process of being stripped, and stripping himself, of false privilege. When first arrested, Solzhenitsyn was a cocky young officer used to having his orders obeyed. On his first trek under guard, he made another prisoner carry his bag. Continue reading "Modernity, Morality and Mimesis"


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