Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 139
November 6, 2015
Weekend Reading: November 6, 2015
November 5, 2015
Screening Room: ‘All Things Must Pass’
In 1999, Tower Records had $1 billion in revenue. They were bankrupt by 2006.
All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records is playing now in limited release. My review is atPopMatters:
Nobody who ever went into the original batch of Tower Records outlets in California ever said, “What a beautiful space.” In that way, they were axiomatic of the greatest record stores, which understood space pragmatically, slapping up some posters and cardboard displays, but otherwise committing to...
Quote of the Day: Pope’s Day
Guy Fawkes Night celebrations at Windsor Castle, 1776
Tonightin England is Guy Fawkes Night. It’s one of the island’s more unusual holidays, in that it commemorates that time in 1605 when a group of Catholic terroristsplotted to blow up the House of Lords on November 5, thus killing King James I and (hopefully) returningthe country to Catholic rule. It didn’t work out so well. Fawkes and his other conspirators were discovered, convicted, and drawn and quartered. The king institutedlaws restri...
November 3, 2015
Reader’s Corner: Umberto Eco’s ‘Numero Zero’
Umberto Eco’s latest novelNumero Zerogoes on sale today. It’s a slim fantasy about crackpot conspiracy theories and journalists who play the game of massaging the truth a little too well.
Eco toldNPRthathe hopes readers of his novel“will become more suspicious and attentive when reading a newspaper.”
My review is atPopMatters:
Beware of stories by hack journalists who are given a chance at doing something greater and in the process discover that the seemingly too-good-to-be-true offer masks s...
November 1, 2015
Writer’s Desk: The American Writers Museum
Sometime in about 2017, there is going to be a new museum on Chicago’s Michigan Avenueright around Lake Street: The American Writers Museum.
According to Publishers Weekly, the project—which sounds both awesome and awesomely quixotic—has been in the works since 2010. Since there won’t be much that amuseum of this sort can resort to in terms of permanent holdings (Mark Twain’s pipe, perhaps? Rooms full of first editions?), it looks like they will be focusing on attention-grabbing experiential...
October 31, 2015
Sound Booth: The Halloween Parade
A timely music break, less for the spooky goings-on tonight than in honor of the late (and admittedly sometimes spooky) Lou Reed. Listen to “Halloween Parade”:
October 30, 2015
Weekend Reading: October 30, 2015
Project Greenlight, you are horrible. Thanks for nothing, Maureen Dowd. Welcome to “Minecraft Hell.” What’s the matter with Kansas? No, really? Wife-sharing as a way of . Traffic, techies, fires, sprawl; the California dream is dead, again. How to get around the rabbis’ Internet ban. Remember Dubya’s Secretary of Education, the one who wanted to defund PBSfor showing same-sex couples? Now she’s running the University of North Carolina. Ravenna, Italy...
October 28, 2015
Screening Room: ‘The Wonders’
A sweet and strange offering from Italy,The Wonders opens this week in limited release. My review is atFilm Journal International:
The state of the ramshackle Tuscan farmhouse inhabited by the family whose members dart and gambol all through The Wonders, Alice Rohrwacher’s sleepy one-ring circus of a film, perfectly mirrors their everyday state of affairs. It’s beautiful in its way but not exactly well-maintained. Nevertheless, it stays up, just like this family stays together even as many o...
October 25, 2015
Writer’s Desk: Writing as a Form of Reading
It’s atruism that one of the best things new writers need to remember is to read. A lot. Not to imitate (though some of that is inevitable, especially at the start) but to understand just what writing is, and to see a book through two sets of eyes at once:
In “Write, Read, Rewrite, Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed,” Susan Sontag limns the linkage between the two:
First, because to write is to...
October 24, 2015
Reader’s Corner: Still Declining
A few items from the latest Pew Research Center study on American reading habits:
72% of American adults read a book in the past year, down from 79% in 2011. Young adults (18-29) more likely than older adults to have read a book in the past year. Average number of books read by women in the past year: 14. … by men: 9.
