Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 116

Weekend Reading: November 18, 2016

In Helsinki you may not even need to own a car by 2025. What the Times‘s sports page would have looked like if the Cubs hadn’t won the World Series. Attacking art galleries to stop gentrification. If you earn over $52,000 a year, that means in global terms, you are now in the one percent. Welcome! What was it like working as Stanley Kubrick’s assistant for decades? Just about what you’d imagine. No, his own party doesn’t know what Trump is going to do, either. All hail the alt-right’s victo...

Screening Room: ‘Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened’

In 1981, Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince were the kings of Broadway. After a decade of shows fromCompanytoSweeney Todd that reinvented the American musical form, they were embarking on another venture:Merrily We Roll Along. Things didn’t go as planned.

Directed by Lonny Price, one of the original cast members, Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is the up-close account of one of Broadway’s most infamous flops. It’s opening this week in limited release and will probably show up on...

Screening Room: ‘All Governments Lie’

You would imagine from the title of the new documentaryAll Governments Lie, that it’s an investigation of, well, government corruption. But that’s only a sideline in this barn-burner about corporate media’s apparent inability to hold those lying politicians to account.

All Governments Lie is playing now in limited release. My review is atFilm Journal International:

If you take everything in Fred Peabody’s screed All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stoneat face value,...

Writer’s Desk: This, Too, Shall Pass

Raymond Chandler was not the happiest soul; something that you can tell all too well from his sardonic and deeply cynical novels.

He also was ever the outsider, too literary for the world of pulp crime, and too pulpy for the literary world (at least back then). So he lashed out at the “literary life” and what “repels” him about it:

…all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few...

Screening Room: ’13th’ and Trump

Ava DuVernay’s documentary13th lays out in stark terms the history of black oppression in America after emancipation, from Klan terrorism to the modern carceral state. It also places this history in very current terms, tying the reactionary racism of Donald Trump’s movement to the segregationist battle against the civil rights movement.

13th is playing in some theaters and is also available on Netflix. My review is atEyes Wide Open:

Slavery was outlawed by the 13th Amendment to the Constitu...

Weekend Reading: November 11, 2016

Scream your worries away in this Cairo bookstore. And here’s what the world is thinking. The new White House chief of staff just might be the architect of modern Internet white rage. Didn’t Nixon have an enemies list, too? Can we just be done with polling, finally? Apparently this allmakes the Klan happy. And then this happened. The safety net depended on by so many Trump voters is about to get eviscerated. Well, that just might be it for the Constitution. Print and read: This is what Amer...

Screening Room: ‘The 13th’ and Trump

Ava DuVernay’s documentaryThe 13th lays out in stark terms the history of black oppression in America after emancipation, from Klan terrorism to the modern carceral state. It also places this history in very current terms, tying the reactionary racism of Donald Trump’s movement to the segregationist battle against the civil rights movement.

The 13th is playing in some theaters and is also available on Netflix. My review is atEyes Wide Open:

Slavery was outlawed by the 13th Amendment to the...

Quote of the Day: Looking Forward

And to all of the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.

That was Hillary Rodham Clinton, winner of the popular vote to become the 45th President of the United States of America.

Weekday Reading: 2016 Election Day Special Edition

Feminism and Tim Kaine as the anti-Trump. Maybe everyone is wrong except for this guy. What happens when a conservative radio host goes Never Trump. Apres Trump, the deluge? A case of actual voter fraud. Don’t worry, America, the militias are here to keep things nice and weird after the election. Even The Onionisn’t sure how to handle this one. Somehow, the GOP leadership is getting even whiter and male-r. Assad to Putin: What dictators think about the election. So what about all those Tru...

Writer’s Desk: How Speechwriters Do It

With the election, and (who knows?) maybe a gut-punch to democracy itself, just around the corner, it seems like the right time to get some writing advice from people who have to churn out a lot of words on demand at high velocity and with extreme precision: Speechwriters.

Scholastic gathered together a bunch of them, from Paul Begala to Bob Shrum, and boiled down their advice to a fewpoints, explained at length here. Here’s the upshot:

Get to the Point — Quick! Make It Look Easy Make ’em L...