I’m thrilled so far with Angels. Mary-Louise Parker is stealing the show as Harper, and Justin Kirk is fantastic as Prior. The homage to Cocteau and the casting of the prior Priors were both brilliant. But why, in their trimming and reshaping, did Kushner and Nichols have to cut my two favorite lines from Millennium Approaches?
I expect conservatives to be offended by many of the lines spoken by Kushner’s characters; I expect conservative critics to acknowledge the distinction between the message of a particular character and the message of the work as a whole. But that is expecting too much of anyone who writes for a partisan magazine (whether the NRO or The Nation) in a climate like ours.
I don’t read White for his reviews, I read him for his attitude, and I wish there were more out there like him.
Listen to Joe Wright’s commentary from tonight’s edition of All Things Considered. Joe’s a medical student at Harvard — 23 or 24 years old, I’d guess — and he already gets it.
Over at Film Journey Jonathan Takagi has posted a series of capsule reviews from his recent trip to Paris.
Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman published a great piece yesterday in Newsday (also available at Common Dreams), in which they argue that the massive economic and social changes necessary to alleviate suffering on a global scale are dependent, finally, upon change of a more fundamental and personal nature
If you’re interested in adding multiple style sheets to your site, do what I did: read Paul Sowden’s excellent tutorial, then rip off his script.
“Big Dipper” is one more track from a mix CD that I received recently. I’ve never been a big fan of Cracker, but this song really works for me. I love the spare arrangement, especially the acoustic piano and steel guitar, but mostly I like this song because of the lyrics and because of David Lowery’s delivery of them.
Today, after tracking down the last of those elusive Philip Roth essays, I gave into my craving and checked out Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, a new collection of essays edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. According to the jacket copy.
Richard Goldstein offers the best one-paragraph synapsis of Angels in America that you’ll ever read. (He also talks to Kushner about Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, the problems of liberalism, and his new musical, Caroline, or Change.)
In this new interview, Mother Jones calls Tony Kushner a “Radical Pragmatist,” a moniker I wouldn’t mind carrying myself.
Newsday posted a fun article yesterday about the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility. Of course, the word “fun” is totally relative when you’re talking about a two-acre plot of land where donated bodies decompose under the close scrutiny of forensic anthropologists.
Y0ung-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents is just about the coolest damn Website I’ve found in months. Finally, someone is doing something original with Flash — and by “original” I mean a backward glance to early-Godard all jumbled together with politics and sex and Blue Note jazz.
If Sullivan reads Angels in America as a Stalinist tract, then I pity his ideological blindness. He’s missing a hell of a play.
“16 Horsepower is a Gothic country-rock quartet from Denver, but their version of “Wayfaring Stranger” feels so fated, so instinctual, it spreads the South all over the American map, a dusting of damnation on wherever you might be as you listen.” — Greil Marcus
We all know that Stanley Kauffman, that grand icon of American film-reviewing, has been with The New Republic since 1958. But did you know that he was preceded immediately by a young punk of a wannabe novelist named Philip Roth?
So, today at lunch a co-worker was getting us all up to speed on the latest episode of Average Joe, and our conversation turned — inevitably, perhaps — to the sick pleasure we humans seem to take from experiencing others’ discomfort.
HBO’s economic freedom is just one of the many topics of discussion over at Newsweek, where Mike Nichols, Tony Kushner, and their cast are talking up Angels in America.
On Friday afternoon I subjected myself to ninety minutes of critical scrutiny by a group of professional historians. And it ended up being a damn good time.
But wish as I might, I can’t yet join the knee-jerkers, and I’m not sure why, exactly. Except that I don’t want it all to have been for nothing.
Halloween is the highest of the holy days in Long Pauses land. My wife spends months planning her costume — this year she was Galadriel, I was Harold (from Harold and Maude).
College football is the only sport capable of raising my heart rate these days.
“When Bush landed on the aircraft carrier in that flight suit, I immediately thought, ‘From now on, just do Bush in the flight suit. Every single time.'”
A diary of my week.
The greatest face in film history? Ray Carney on John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz.
I first read Sam Shepard’s Buried Child five years ago in a graduate readings course in American drama. Last night I was finally able to experience it in performance, which, as is always the case with great drama, is a quite different thing.
Paul Ford posted a great piece on the death of Elliott Smith that is all the more timely given the impending release of that Sylvia Plath film.
Some days I fantasize about giving up on this dissertation. Mostly I want my free time back. I want to walk into a library and choose a book that has nothing to do with Cold War history or American literature.
“Are You Awake?” by Kevin Shields is almost literally a song of the moment. At 1 minute, 35 seconds, it’s my shortest selection yet. I grabbed it from the Lost in Translation soundtrack, which I’ve been listening to all day at work. There’s something beautifully hypnotic about it.
