In the summer of 1970, at about the time of the release of her novel Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion spent a month driving through the Gulf Coast states with her husband John Gregory Donne hoping to discover a magazine piece to write.
Tweet the Press: How the Media Enable Trump
Like a bad Broadway play, the Anthony Scaramucci show closed after only 11 days. But in his brief time as White House communications director, the Mooch gave quite a performance. He announced himself with a string of profanities, duly reproduced in the quality journals, which was a real pleasure.
Though if I Hurt Myself Doing it, at least I’ll Still Have Health Insurance
(Rondeau with a Line by Anthony Scaramucci)
Grown-Up Hip Hop
Jay-Z & his mother Gloria Carter rap about her coming out in “Smile”–an exemplary track on 4:44.
The Resistance to “Confederate”
Game of Thrones’ show runner David Benioff and his collaborator D.B. Weiss announced on July 19th that HBO had commissioned Confederate, elsewhere described as an alternate history drama imagining, among other things, slavery in a Confederacy surviving into our own day. An immediate twitter storm ensued, followed within few hours by the first of three NYT articles about the tweets, two of them enlivened by serial fatuities from notional experts—after all, there are no experts on television programs that have not yet been written, nor on history that didn’t happen.
The Murderers and the Nun
I had problems with The Keepers.
That’s the recent seven-part Netflix documentary about the unsolved murder of Cathy Cesnick, a Baltimore nun, who disappeared in November 1969 and whose partly decomposed body was found two months later in a patch of scrub woods.
“Once Upon a Time in America”
In Sergio Leone’s valedictory film, every image, to borrow a phrase from Andrew Sarris writing on John Ford in The American Cinema, is haunted by its “memory image on the horizon of history.” Ford is still Leone’s master, even in a film whose antagonists — “Noodles” Aronson (Robert De Niro) and Max Bercovj (James Woods) — pointedly recall the gangster movies Raoul Walsh made about friends who rise up from the same slum neighborhood and become foes because of class divisions.
Citizen Jay-Z
Originally published in 2001.
Acts of Creation
Originally posted in 2012.
“New Day” – the song at the heart of Jay-Z’s and Kanye West’s collaborative CD Watch the Throne – is about the prospective joy (and pain) of fathering a…Brother.
Back to Life (Redux)
Excerpted from a piece originally published in First in 1999.
When rap star Jay-Z was fourteen—angry about a stolen/borrowed piece of jewelry—he ended up shooting his older brother. He rhymes about this in “You Must Love Me” (In My Lifetime, Vol. 1)
Peggy Lee Revisited
A recent discussion on the message board brought back memories from my youth of a glamorous figure in a time when glamour had not yet assumed the tawdry implications that would later become attached to it. In 1959, Peggy Lee appeared in an engagement at a nightclub in New York City called Basin Street East, a place in which she’d achieved a triumph the year before. The poster announcing her return was displayed in front of the club and became a sensation unto itself. Versions of it made their way into newspapers, and it was pasted up on available surfaces everywhere on the island of Manhattan. In it, Peggy was wearing a white, backless, sequined gown, and the picture was taken from behind. Her bare back, revealed to the waist, was a thing of beauty to behold, and she was looking over her shoulder, her mysteriously lovely countenance caught in a look of elegant seduction. Whatever else she might have been, she was certainly an astonishing presence. Sparks seemed to fly away from her person and draw strangers into the aura they projected. This startling vision was, at the same time, contrasted by a clear statement of aloofness, distance, and unavailability. There was no question that the image being observed, although unquestionably magnificent, was an artifice that she had created. It was a measure of her talent in this regard that nobody ever asked about the real woman behind the mask. In bold letters above the photo, the caption read, “PEGGY’S BACK!”
Songs of Summer: Loesch and Lynch
When I was young and things made sense, every summer Hollywood would release a handful of outrageously expensive movies in which aliens, sentient robots from the future, natural disasters on CGI steroids, etc. would wipe cities off the map and send audiences home happy. Cleansed.
On “Wonder Woman”
Most of what I’ve read about Patty Jenkins’s 2017 Wonder Woman, and most of what my friends have said about the movie, has been strongly positive, and the aspect of the film commented on most positively is its sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit feminism. I have no quarrel with these pieces and comments; I saw the film twice and thought it not only intelligently, brashly feminist but also stylish–the classiest and least patriarchal superhero film I’ve seen in a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of them.
Watching it as a pacifist, though, I was aware of another pattern of meaning, one having to do with the film’s naturalization of war and marginalization of peacemaking, of what William James called “the war on war.”
A Guided Tour Through a Graveyard: Some Representations of War and the Hazards of Strong Contextualism
I shall describe and attempt to interpret a difference in representations of war in two television series made by the same people about the same war, Band of Brothers, which aired in 2001, and The Pacific, which aired in 2010. I hope to show that despite influential argument to the contrary—most notably Paul Fussell’s celebrated The Great War and Modern Memory—it is imprudent to make strong historicist or contextualist claims that the transformed nature of war since 1914 is a sine qua non for explaining modern ironic and anti-heroic representations of combat.
Pretty Little Pantoum
Many characters kill people
in the show I watch with my daughter.
What is this teaching her?
The men take their shirts off, often.
“Atlanta’s” Elevator to the Sanctum
The first ten episodes of Donald Glover’s marvelous FX series Atlanta aired weekly from early September through November 1, 2016. Its first season, in other words, unfolded throughout the weeks leading up to the presidential election. In retrospect the power of its first season may live on in as a powerful snapshot of what we were, or thought we were, in the last months of Obama’s America. It wasn’t a particularly pretty picture, but the very different feel of national events since November make me wonder if Atlanta‘s spectrum of tones can be repeated in the next season. Season One is almost always comic, but its humor ranges from darkly satiric to tender and romantic as the show conjures up rootsy yet media-savvy depictions of life in Atlanta.
Monkey Time: An Excerpt from “River Under the Road”
Scott Spencer’s River Under the Road is a condition of America novel that’s right on time even though it’s set in the 70s and 80s.