Category: art

  • Fearful Symmetry
    Blake by Peter Ackroyd.  Knopf.  399 pp. My re-kindled interest in Blake began, weirdly enough, when I ordered some copies of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior for some inmates and noticed that the most perceptive Amazon review was written by a woman named Laurie from New Zealand.  I clicked to see the rest of ...
    Read more
  • Stop Me Before I See More Movies!
    Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2016 Thursday The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith  ***   Forever, Chinatown **1/2 The 100 Years Show **** The Many Sad Faces of Mr. Toledano ****   By Sydney Lumet  ***1/2   Weiner **1/2 Friday  The Black Belt *** Trapped ****   Dancing for You ***** Dixieland  **   Tarikat ***** Horizons ****   Two Trains Runnin’ **** Saturday  Following Seas ***** Life, Animated **** Raising Bertie ** Hours spent standing in line, sometimes ...
    Read more
  • I Used to Think I Wanted to Be Promiscuous
    A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch.  Penguin.  205 pp.  $15.00 Everything about my reading of Iris Murdoch has changed since I read Dwight Garner’s review of her new volume of letters and A.N. Wilson’s marvelous memoir.  Wilson was right in his introduction; I had perhaps unconsciously reduced her in my mind to the dotty old woman ...
    Read more
  • The Bitter Face of a Marriage
    45 Years A Film by Andrew Haigh In the same weekend, a friend e-mailed to tell me that 45 Years was a great film—he had just seen it with his wife to celebrate his 63rd birthday—and I heard another friend say, to someone who asked, “Don’t bother.  The whole damn thing is too depressing.” I don’t think ...
    Read more
  • You Didn’t Know You Had It Until It Was Gone
    Youth  A Film by Paolo Sorrentino “Two seniors for youth.”  It was a funny remark that I didn’t realize I was making until I said it.  But then, apparently, it was adopted all the way down the ticket line.  If that Saturday afternoon showing in Asheville was any indication, the people who are seeing this movie ...
    Read more
  • The True Art Is Your Life
    Dharma Art by Chogyam Trungpa.  The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa Volume Seven.  pp. 3-162.  Shamblala.  2004. Zen and Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori.  Ballantine Books.  248 pp.  $25.95. I look back with great fondness on the days when I wrote my first novel.  It was 1973, and I had just turned 25.  ...
    Read more
  • Things Are Not as They Seem, Nor Are They Otherwise
    Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem.  Doubleday.  467 pp.  $34.00 Chronic City is a book about all those little New York people who live in the city but you don’t know what they do.  You see them having coffee and a Danish at a diner at 3:00 in the afternoon (or the morning for that matter); you ...
    Read more
  • Portrait of the Artist as a Bulldog
    Mr. Turner. A film by Mike Leigh. There’s a lot not to like in Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s biopic of the British artist J.M. W. Turner (Timothy Spall). The man is often gruff and uncommunicative. He is especially so with his housekeeper, Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who obviously worships him and would do anything for him, ...
    Read more
  • The Utopian Theology of Guy Davenport
    The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The Bicycle Rider, Wo es war, woll Ich warden, The Ringdove Sign.  Stories by Guy Davenport from The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing.  Shoemaker & Hoard.  379 pp.  $16.00. When I was a student at Duke University in the late Sixties, we sometimes got together to argue about who ...
    Read more