Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 174

Tribeca Film Festival, Part II: ‘All About Ann’ and ‘Art and Craft’

(Image courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival)

In the last weekend of the Tribeca Film Festival, a strong slate of documentaries showedthat covered things southern, eccentric art forgers and brassy politicos. My seconddispatch runs today at PopMatters, here.

First isAll About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State.Befitting its once-in-a-lifetime subject, this clearly worshipful documentary is big-hearted and loud-mouthed, but gets by on the strength of sheer personality. It’s also screen...

Writer’s Corner: Oates on Oates

In a mostly successful attempt to undermine and interrogate the whole concept of author publicity, the writer as an identity, the interview process itself, Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself for theWashington Post.

One key takeaway:

Is there something frankly embarrassing or shameful about being a “writer”?

The public identification does seem just a bit self-conscious, at times. Like identifying oneself as a “poet,” “artist,” “seer,” “visionary.”

Also, this:

Let’s get back to the crucial questio...

Department of Weekend Reading: April 25, 2014

Here’s a few reasons why the great robot/AI rebellion is inevitable, unless we change programming.
Sad Desk Lunch.
No, the IRS actually didn’t target just right-wingers.
Kids today: Not nearly so tech-savvy as you’d think
Garry Wills on the anti-Obamacare gang: “Facts don’t matter when a cult is involved.”
When mainland Chinese go to Hong Kong it can get ugly.
MoMA as “business-driven carnival.”
The is no stranger to those who pay attention.
“They want life to be better, but they...

Screening Room, Tribeca Film Fest Edition: ‘An Honest Liar’ and ‘In Order of Disappearance’

(Image courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival)

Getting to the Tribeca Film Festival only in its final weekend, but better late to the festival than never. My coverage will be running in pairs atPopMatters over the next few days, usually a documentary along with a narrative film that has little to no relation to the other. Hopefully the randomness of the pairings will help replicate the festival experience, only without the long lines and well-meaning volunteers.

The initialdispatch runs today, h...

In Books: ‘Shotgun Lovesongs’

One of the more gushed-about fiction debuts of the season has been Nickolas Butler’sShotgun Lovesongs. Inspired in part by the story of Bon Iver recording an album in a remote Wisconsin cabin, Butler’s story is a nostalgic, idealized paen to small-town life structured around a plot about four buddies growing up and growing apart.

My review is atPopMatters:

There are quiet hymns to the quiet life still published today. You find them scattered here and there amidst the angsty blank urban snarksca...

In Books: ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ 75th Anniversary

Dust Bowl farm, June 1938, by Dorothea Lange (Library of Congress)

Seventy-five years ago this month, John Steinbeck publishedThe Grapes of Wrath. The anniversary is as good an excuse as any to go back and crack open this gorgeous, painful, Biblical epic.

I wrote about The Grapes ofWrath and its continuing power and relevancefor the The Barnes & Noble Review:

Freedomin America has always been entwined with freedom of movement. The freedom to immigrate, the freedom to relocate from one state to t...

Reader’s Corner: Free Books from the Vatican

The opening of the gospel of Matthew, in Persian. Possibly acquired by the Vatican in the 16th century (Library of Congress)

The Vatican Library, with its gaudy halls and astounding troves of rare manuscripts—not to mention that ever-exciting aura of deep dark mystery—is about to get a whole lot less secret. Last week, the Vatican began a multi-year project to digitize 1.5 million pages from their 82,000 manuscripts. Then they’re going to post it all online.

According to the Chicago Tribune:

“Th...

Screening Room: ‘The Exorcist’ and True Evil

Turns out that besides being a young preacher, scourge of the empowered classes, and essayist whose words could scorch the hair right off your head, James Baldwin was also a crack film critic, when he wanted to be.

In The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky pulls out a choice quote of Baldwin’s from his mostly ignored 1976 book The Devil Finds Work. Here, he writes about one of the decade’s two most influential horror films (the other being Halloween, just as trashy but not given as much critical deferen...

Department of Weekend Reading: April 18, 2014

Director Werner Herzog didn’t have shoes until he was 11; also he only watches 2 or3 movies a year.
Veterans who becomewhite supremacists.
The second-most reprinted book in the English language after the King James Bible is about fishing.
Nice try, Jenny: The anti-vaccination whitewash.
Samarkand, the lostempire of multicultural, pan-religious traders.
Newest Saudi craze: the penguin dance.
A media darling governor with a vindictive streak; Meet the new Sarah Palin.
The racist demagogue who might so...

In Memorium: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014)

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist, journalist, fabulist, realist, radical, magical Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away today at his home in Mexico City, at the age of 87.

You will read many books in your life without coming across one with a more perfect beginning than that of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, fragrant as it was with the promise of the wild and ravishing pages to follow:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant aft...