Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 107
April 19, 2017
Screening Room: ‘Citizen Jane’
In the 1950s, when bulldozing historic downtowns under the flag of “urban renewal” was all the rage, architecture journalist Jane Jacobs was one of the loudest and most eloquent voices of the resistance. A new documentary on her, Citizen Jane: Battle for New York, chronicles her fight against the city planners who dreamed of replacing organic urban chaos with high-rise and parking lot dead zones.
Citizen Jane opens in limited release this week. My review is at Film Journal International:
At...
April 16, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Go Listen to Classical Music
[image error]It’s always something. Even after writers find the right time and place to get their work done, more often than not, their attention wanders. The easy accessibility of smartphones and other digital distractions further frays our already tenuously held attention spans.
Anne Quito noted her problems with this in a recent article for Quartz:
Like the rest of the so-called multitasking generation (a.k.a. GenM), my default mode is to start two or more things at the same time, and that approach had...
April 14, 2017
Weekend Reading: April 14, 2017
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Is this the end of police reform? So who was in Mittens’ “binders full of women,” anyway? From Indiana to Greece, “deaths of despair.” The Black Legion: Like the Ku Klux Klan, but far worse. Which airlines kick off the most passengers? Making America great again by … returning to predatory student loans. Print and read: Historian Rick Perlstein on how he and other historians have been writing about American conservatism all wrong.
April 11, 2017
Reader’s Corner: ‘The Road to Jonestown’
The legacy of Jonestown is as horrifying as it is opaque. In The Road to Jonestown, out this week, Jeff Guinn (Manson) digs into the full history of Jim Jones, Peoples Temple, and how it led from an idealistic religious and political movement in 1950s Indiana to cult depravity and a mass murder/suicide in the jungle of Guyana.
My review is at PopMatters:
What do you do with something like Jonestown? How did over 900 Americans end up committing what appeared to be mass suicide at a remote jun...
April 10, 2017
Screening Room: ‘The Lost City of Z’
For his first cinematic venture outside of New York City, James Gray (The Immigrant, We Own the Night) takes on an ambitious adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction rain forest adventure epic, The Lost City of Z.
The movie opens this week. My review is at Film Journal International:
Gray’s movie tracks the obsessive search of British officer and accidental adventurer Percy Fawcett (Charles Hunnam) for proof of a vanished Amazonian city. Fawcett’s modest background keeps him back. Surprisingly...
April 9, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Go for a Walk
[image error]Taking a restorative walk is always good for the mind, the heart, and the soul. Even when the weather is awful (heat, snow, what have you), a walk almost always clears the mind and puts you in better shape to do whatever lays ahead.
In Kathleen Rooney’s Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, a great new novel about a New York flaneuse and wordsmith, Boxfish is a great proponent of going for lunchtime walks through crowded midtown Manhattan in order to juice her writing:
For me, a peaceful atmosphere d...
April 7, 2017
Weekend Reading: April 7, 2017
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Nevertheless, the tote bags persisted. Connecticut police want to make their drones lethal. We are officially through the looking glass, people. Seven-figure salary for the basketball coach? Sure! Keep the university press open? Nah… HBO filming the Elena Ferrante novels, at least one eight-episode season. The Reichstag fire was the “archetype of terror management.“ Gen. Stanley McChrystal: PBS is awesome, by the way. Print and read: The great voter fraud investigation that … wasn’t. Bonus...April 4, 2017
Screening Room: ‘1984’ Tonight
George Orwell started off Nineteen Eighty-Four this way:
It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
That day was April 4.
So in a backhanded compliment to Orwell’s ability to portend, shall we say, certain aspects of the modern political climate, theaters around the country are screening Michael Radford’s movie adaptation tonight. Check out the participating theaters here.
April 2, 2017
Writer’s Desk: Frost
[image error]Robert Frost, whose birthday was a week ago today, is probably today still the best-known American poet after Maya Angelou.
But he also wrote a fair amount of criticism, which was collected back in 1973. A few of the lines culled from that book by the Times are worth sharing, whether one is working in prose, poetry, or what have you:
A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written … Progress is not the aim, but circulation.
[Style] indicates how a writer takes himself and...
April 1, 2017
Reader’s Corner: Go Shopping
We know that money doesn’t buy happiness. Yet, sometimes shopping does make people feel better; or at least they think it does. So here’s the question, can buying something in particular make you happier than something else?
A study published last year in Psychological Science tried this experiment:
They gave vouchers to extraverts and introverts to either buy a drink or a book. Along the way, participants repeatedly completed a measure of positive and negative mood so that the researchers c...
