Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 62
May 10, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Create a Manifesto
When you are in doubt about your next steps whether as an artist or just as a person it cannot hurt to lay out your goals. Witness Lorraine Hansberry. After moving to New York from Chicago and before storming Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun, she was writing poetry and journalism, finding
May 8, 2020
Quote of the Day: Going Full Banana Republic
On Michael Flynns surprise (or maybe not so surprising) exoneration by the Justice Department: It is exceptionally rare for the U.S. Department of Justice to move in court to dismiss a case in which a defendant hasably assisted by first-class lawyersentered into a plea agreement to spare himself prosecution on more serious felony charges. It
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Screening Room: ‘How to Build a Girl’
Caitlin Morans popular YA novel How to Build a Girl was about a geeky girl from the Midlands who takes a sharp left-turn into hipsterdom when she reinvents herself as a snarky music journalist in the 1990s. (You know, when Happy Mondays were a thing.) The movie adaptation of How to Build a Girl, starring
May 7, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Spaceship Earth’
The new documentary Spaceship Earth opens digitally (like everything else has to now) tomorrow. My review is at The Playlist: Matching jumpsuits. Soaring white geodesic Fuller domes. Desert setting. Beaming smiles from people who appear not unfamiliar with things like EST seminars and primal scream therapy. Grainy film footage. The sense of embarking on a
May 4, 2020
Reader’s Corner: New Graphic Novels
I reviewed these three incredible graphic novels Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg, Paying the Land by Joe Sacco, and Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna for the Minneapolis Star-Tribunes Sunday book section. You can read the story here.
May 3, 2020
Writer’s Desk: It’s Not That Serious
In James Taylor Marked for Death the great rock critic Lester Bangs had this to say about art, creativity, and their appreciation: Number one, everybody should realize that all this art and bop and rock-n-roll and whatever is all just a joke and a mistake, just a hunka foolishness so stop treating it with any
May 2, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Empire of the Sun’
My article on Steven Spielbergs 1987 epic adaptation of J.G. Ballards Empire of the Sun was published at Eyes Wide Open: Spielberg chose a story with few chases, a rouges gallery of foul characters, no uplift, and a healthy dash of surrealism. British speculative fiction novelist J.G. Ballards grim autobiographical novel detailed in stark terms
April 26, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Create Dangerously
Albert Camus did not approach the act of writing lightly. Although he gets lumped in with a certain class of French intellectuals whose headiness got in their way, Camus used a clean and light touch in his work. Any of us who have gone back to his unnervingly relevant novel The Plague these last few
April 24, 2020
Screening Room: ‘Capital in the 21st Century’
Six years ago, a 700ish-page economics tome by a French academic with a Marxian bent became a surprise bestseller. Now, Capital in the 21st Century is a documentary. My review is at PopMatters: Justin Pembertons Capital in the Twenty-First Century takes the fundamental arguments of Pikettys book and presents them in an engaging, visually brisk manner that
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April 19, 2020
Writer’s Desk: Throw Most of It Away
There are times when your writing project takes forever. You head to the keyboard each day, knowing that you will emerge on the other side with naught but a few sentences, as fought-over as a few square yards of Flanders mud during an interminable battle in the First World War. But that can be worth
