Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 106
May 12, 2017
Weekend Reading: May 12, 2017
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After this week’s Tuesday Afternoon Massacre, here’s a quick refresher on Watergate, just in case that becomes relevant. Inside the White House, the president “would sometimes scream at television clips about the [Russia] probe.“ Turns out, the ex-FBI director wasn’t exactly right about Huma Abedin forwarding thousands of classified emails to husband Anthony Weiner; they only found two. Facial scans coming soon to a U.S. airport near you. They shall not be questioned: Woman is convicted of...
May 11, 2017
Screening Room: ‘Elian’
In 1999, a five-year-old Cuban boy was plucked from the waters off Florida. The story that followed was part international incident, part domestic political soap opera, and all spectacle.
CNN’s ‘Elian’ documentary is opening this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:
[The 1990s] saw the 24/7 news cycle roar to life in spectacularly messy fashion through round-the-clock coverage of everything from the O.J. Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey cases to the siege in Waco,...
May 7, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Do What Zadie Smith Says
[image error]Zadie Smith—you know her, buzzy English novelist (White Teeth, On Beauty) with an incomparably cool style and legions of fans—is an accomplished enough author at a relatively young age that when she laid down a list of writing tips for the Guardian back in 2010, people paid attention.
Listen up:
1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an en...
May 5, 2017
Weekend Reading: May 5, 2017
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Ella Fitzgerald at 100. According to Anthony Bourdain, Singapore has the world’s best airport food. Checking out people instead of books at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library in Little Rock. Shouting at a Congressperson who’s not your own. So what’s in that algorithm which helps determine jail sentences, anyway? Halal snack packs and what they mean for democracy … or something. Print and read: The reactionaries calling for an end to multiculturalism, modernity, and democracy itse...April 30, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Just Put it Down
[image error]Earlier this week, Robert M. Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, died at the age of 88. Although the book, a philosophical rumination cast in the guise of a father-son road-trip novel, mostly holds true to its subtitle (“An Inquiry Into Values”), there’s also some solid writing advice to be found.
In the book, Pirsig is trying to help his son write a letter to his mother:
I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuc...
April 29, 2017
Screening Room: ‘Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2’
The summer movie season is already started, thanks to The Fate of the Furious. But now it gets going in style, with the sequel to James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy hitting theaters next Friday.
My review is at Film Journal International:
The anticipation couldn’t be higher for Gunn’s sequel, a movie that depends on being nimble on its feet. Those expectations are met, and then some, in a bigger, bolder outing that locks the audience in from a credits sequence in which Baby Groot (a comput...
Screening Room: Tribeca Film Festival
The 2017 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival wraps up this weekend. As ever, the programmers have culled a potent batch of nonfiction movies, some of which should eventually make their way to a theater near you. In some cases they’ll be showing on TV.
Here’s a few highlighted documentaries that I reviewed for The Playlist:
LA 92 — A Harrowing, Incendiary Epic of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (premieres on National Geographic on April 30) The Public Image is Rotten — Anger is Still an Energy i...April 28, 2017
Weekend Reading: April 28, 2017
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What’s the best way to track enemy warships and airplanes? Twitter. Fox News and the legal maelstrom that’s just getting started. The napkin that turned economic theory into magic. Organic salad, now with decomposed bat. Maybe it’s actually unintelligent voters who are the problem. When gambling and the NFL is a problem, and when it’s not. What happened to the great British novel, anyway? And here come the alt-right bully boys. No, despite what you read on Facebook,April 23, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Don’t Worry About Your Desk
[image error]Writers get a lot of advice. Not just about how to write, but when and even where to write.
Fortunately, there’s Margaret Atwood. Rebecca Mead notes this about Atwood’s writing space in a recent profile:
Unlike many writers, Atwood does not require a particular desk, arranged in a particular way, before she can work. “There’s a good and a bad side to that,” she told me. “If I did have those things, then I would be able to put myself in that fetishistic situation, and the writing would flow in...
April 21, 2017
Weekend Reading: April 21, 2017
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How the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were obsessed with taking down … Billie Holiday. The best group to donate money to this month? This Girl Scout troop whose members are all homeless. How television manipulates the president. How men’s income affects their political beliefs. How Trump doomed O’Reilly. The useless $400 juicer that Silicon Valley loved. Asking where “are the white people” in Hidden Figures, getting rid of the drum solo in Whiplash, and other adventures in studio note hell. T...
