I’m Not There forces Breihan to throw his hands in the air. Although he’s certainly right that in Haynes’ film the music enforces the Dylan mythos instead of being an end in itself, I’m not sure you can dismiss Dylan’s own propensity for allying himself with history – for wanting to merge with history. I’m

Don’t Start Me Talkin’

To honor I’m Not There, which I saw yesterday, here’s a great, rare live performance. Thin, wiry, at the verge of implosion like Entertainment-era Gang of Four, it’s one of the best of his I’ve seen:

I admire Marcello Carlin because he writes posts as if they were paid magazine articles. Then, on the couple of occasions when as an editor I solicited material from him, he delights me with submissions that suffers no loss of concentration. Since I know little about his private life, I can only guess at the

Kelly McDonald’s delicately shaded pathos lets the air into the vacuum chamber of the Coens’ adaptation of No Country For Old Men. By filming most of McDonald’s last scene off-camera, they actually improve on the novel; sketching a character’s loss of dignity works best on the page, without the camera’s literalizing tendencies. I also liked

Lily Bart killed herself! According to a Charles McGrath story in today’s New York Times, a letter written by Edith Wharton to Dr. Francis Kinnicutt, “a well-known society doctor who specialized in the mental ailments of the well-to-do,” supposedly reveals that Wharton planned on doing away with the heroine of her second and best novel

As astonishing as James Murphy and Pat Mahoney’s Fabriclive comp is, I think Murphy and his boys have surpassed a lot of this source material on their own records.

A dog

The appearance of Harry Dean Stanton in Alpha Dog is its most surreal moment. He has a scene in the first third in which he rasps some rutting-goat pussy talk to the Johnny Truelove character on a baseball field that warms Bruce Willis’ smirk into a smile faster than receiving his first cut of the

Why Norman Mailer is immortal…

From The Armies of the Night, his essay-novel about the 1967 anti-war rallies, in which he resorts to every bit of skullduggery to get himself arrested: …Mailer finally came to decide that his love for his wife while not at all equal or congruent to his love for America was damnably parallel. It was not

Why Norman Mailer is immortal…

From The Armies of the Night, his essay-novel about the 1967 anti-war rallies, in which he resorts to every bit of skullduggery to get himself arrested: …Mailer finally came to decide that his love for his wife while not at all equal or congruent to his love for America was damnably parallel. It was not

I’ll be back tomorrow after I’ve purged my system of birthday impurities.

Hilarity and hooey

Matos has a wonderful post about his experience watching The Piano Teacher. When I saw it in 2002 it spooked me in ways that movies rarely do, and for months afterwards I wondered whether Michael Haneke’s immersion in masochism obscured me from judging its merits. It reminded me of Pauline Kael’s caveats about Hitchcock’s Psycho:

Favorite Hitchens Antic #891

At the National Book Awards dinner last night. Favorite bit: Asked in an e-mail whether Mr. Shelton was telling the truth, Mr. Hitchens responded with an oblique but suggestive message: “The standard of fact-checking for Vanity Fair articles is very high.” EDIT: This kind of nonsense does him no favors. I recall Alexander Cockburn’s remark