The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual
“We keep returning to this story about pod people because we’re terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era.”
Category: Essays
Can’t Repeat the Past? Of Course You Can’t – and Shouldn’t
Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century
Letter from New York (c. 1980)
“The problem is other people crazy people.”
Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing
“His plan mirrors Johnny’s, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place.
Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
All Tomorrow’s Playground Narratives: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita
“Kubrick’s 1961 film is really the first 1970s movie.”
The “Bong” Goodbye: On Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice
Will Thomas Pynchon’s lightest, brightest novel put him in the Hollywood spotlight?
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
On the Incomprehensibility of Timely Films Past Their Time: Or, A Signing Fool Watches The Singing Fool
“Not frustration of a desire of the subject, but frustration by an object in which his desire is alienated and which the more it is elaborated, the more profound the alienation from his jouissance becomes for the subject.”
Drama · Essays · Uncategorized
An Atheist’s Guide to Wise Blood: The Doctrine of the Auto-Redemptionist
“It’s almost as if The Misfit himself were behind the camera.”
Essays · Film Technology & History · Music & Musicals
Art Thou Troubled? Musicals May Calm Thee
But don’t forget DVD opera
Here Come the Bromides: Living in the Era of the Bromantic Comedy
“Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.” — Vladimir Nabokov
Ghidorah Attacks! Modern Narrative’s Three-Headed Monster
“The concept of pure art pure poetry, pure painting, and so on is not entirely without meaning; but it refers to an aesthetic reality as difficult to define as it is to combat. In any case, even if a certain mixing of the arts remains possible, like the mixing of genres, it does not necessarily follow that they are all fortunate mixtures. There are fruitful cross-breedings which add to the qualities derived from the parents; there are attractive but barren hybrids and there are likewise hideous combinations that bring forth nothing but chimeras.”
The Complete A of Altruism: In Which the Selfish Gene Explains Everything
Except whether to laugh or cry
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
Between Nudist Morality and Freudian Realism! Denuding Fleshly Hypocrisies, Cinematic and Otherwise
“Nude on the Moon’s exploitation is as innocent as the Good Christo-Nudist’s reclaiming of a pre-figleafed (albeit non-recreational) Eden.”
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Photo Essays
Retro Virus: Did AIDS Perform Nensha?
“Be aware: there are forces at work here of which we have no knowledge.”
Hotels and Homelands: After Ken and Rosa
Neither will be the same
Composers · Essays · Music & Musicals
Finding Unlikely Ideology in Prokofiev: Polyphonic and Anti-Authoritarian Gestures in The Gambler
“Alexei must be condemned to the pointless, loveless, and finally false freedom of a spinning limbo, as unfinished and unfinishable as the best Bakhtinian polyphony.”
Activist & Political · Essays · Silents
Metropolis, Ezra Pound, Mammon: And the Law of Too-Large Numbers
“The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.”
Lost Watches and Lost Souls: From New Jersey to Old Istanbul
Fresh Starts Don’t Come Easy
The Misery Business: In Which Your Agent Will Be Lauren Bacall
And your ankles will still bebroken
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