“You hear poetry in these commercials on television, and it’s almost like the kiss of death,” chuckles poet Sekou Sundiata, referring to the TV spots featuring Star Trek’s William Shatner singing the praises of Priceline.com in full beatnik mode. “How far can the end be?” Although Sundiata can giggle about…
The following is a list of women who have been raped, mutilated, tortured, enslaved, crippled, or murdered–and quite often, all of the above. In some cases, these women have also suffered miscarriages, been rendered infertile, contracted horrific diseases, and gone insane. Some of them have even been killed twice, perhaps…
Before Women Who Love Too Much and Codependent No More, there was Georgia O’Keeffe and her watercolors. Characteristically dressed in a long black sweater, O’Keeffe peers out at the audience from the dimly lit stage of the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre. “Watercolors are tricky,” she observes in Lucinda McDermott’s O’Keeffe! “When…
Fifty years into the Twentieth Century jazz became the true voice of black and white urban America. There is something about jazz that embodies the sum and substance of the American city: It is seductive, direct, and purifying (for proof check out or reacquaint yourself with Charles Mingus’s “Boogie Stop…
To begin let us discuss puking. You know, upchucking, barfing, yacking, Technicolor yawning. Always unpleasant — and yet usually a great relief to a queasy gut — a nice vomit can be provoked by just about anything, but a few catalysts seem to work every time. Agents of proven reliability…
Dinosaurs used to be cool. In 1969 if you had asked me what was the best movie ever made, the answer would likely have been The Valley of Gwangi, in which a group of cowboys in the Mexican desert find a gully full of leftover dinosaurs, animated by Ray Harryhausen,…
The big screen in these parts keeps getting better. For discriminating fans of fine cinema, the local independent theaters have been offering real treasures lately. Take the beautiful French-Canadian film Set Me Free at the Cosford, the Miami Film Festival hit East-West at Absinthe House, and the amazing double-shot opening…
Go window-shopping along the sidewalks of Little Havana this weekend, and what might you see? Pastelitos baked to flaky perfection, spiritual self-help paperbacks and Castro conspiracy hardcovers, plastic Catholic saints next to black Santería candles, stylish guayaberas and Panama hats, big-screen TVs tuned to Telemundo, dude lying in bed. Wait…
“A meal was brought/With blood, and each sate sullenly apart/Gorging himself in gloom: No love was left;/All Earth was but one thought — and that was death.” — George Gordon, Lord Byron from “Darkness” In Unsheathed: A Gothic Tale, an original story and work by choreographer Esaias Johnson, it’s not…
Praying with the Enemy
This was to be a column extolling the daring and inventiveness of a very groovy Sci Fi Network television show called good vs. evil, in which two dead men — a ‘fro-sporting, cool-spouting brutha and his pale-faced partner — try to save the souls of those who have made Faustian…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
Why is it that foreign directors master the coming-of-age story much better than Americans? Maybe it’s because subtlety seems very unchildlike in this nation’s eyes, but subtlety is exactly what this genre needs, and what foreign films often give it. Case in point: the 1999 French-Canadian film Set Me Free…
When Werner Herzog was still a teenager, he found himself living in an apartment with several other boarders — one of them a maniacal, uncontrollable actor named Klaus Kinski. Fifteen years later, he cast Kinski as the lead in Aguirre, Wrath of God, the German director’s first (relatively) big-budget film…
The way Lisa Fittipaldi recounts it, she had little choice but to become the only blind watercolor artist in the world. Her husband made her. “He had just had emergency surgery, and he told me he couldn’t live with me like this, that one of us had to be functional,”…
Every year summer in Miami brings to mind a few things: thighs searing on boiling car seats, steamy daily afternoon rain dousings, nostril-burning 90-degree temperatures, the looming threat of the latest hurricane, and, of course, no relief until at least mid-November. Sad sacks unable to escape the horror that is…
Peter Becker is the most important man in the movie business, even though you have no idea who he is. Becker himself would not cop to such a description; he, like few else in the business called show, does not put himself before the work. To describe what he does…
Immigration is a physical act. A body of water is crossed; a mountain range grows smaller and smaller until it appears to be the knuckles of a hand resting on the earth. A dissonant jumble of consonants and vowels seeps into our thoughts until our dreams are flooded. We fall…
Andy Warhol’s art encapsulated the presumed banality of late twentieth-century American culture. He also exemplified the aesthetic ideal of the dandy: Life and work became one. Self-indulgent and reticent, Warhol, toward the end of his life, constructed for himself a quasi-autistic persona. Either praised or vilified, with Andy there was…
You’ve got to feel sorry for the Scottish Board of Tourism. First the Loch Ness monster is exposed as a fake, and then their nation’s film industry starts to pick up. Normally a successful film industry would be great for a country’s image, but in the case of Scotland, it…
Despite the titleEast Is East, the big message of this flavorful domestic memoir is really that West is West. In the tug of war between East and West for a soul, East, the film suggests, may hold out for a while through a combination of nostalgia, pride, national resentment, and…
Everybody is a princess at one point or another. Rich girls work it from birth to final crackup. Bourgeois girls play the precious-and-misunderstood game through adolescence, shifting it into ruthless ambition shortly thereafter. Poor girls can blow an entire lifetime just screwing up their hair and pretending they’re Galadriel. As…
