Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 73
August 6, 2019
Screening Room: ‘One Child Nation’
In the new documentary from Nanfu Wang (Hooligan Sparrow), she returns to her native China to find out what 35 years of the one-child policy meant to people. What she finds is horror, guilt, resignation, and corruption, with a deeply personal angle. One Child Nation opens in limited release and on Amazon this week. My …
August 4, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Try a New Format
Sometimes the same-old, same-old just does not work for what you are trying to accomplish. If you feel that you (or your work, or both) are in a rut, try changing things up. Consider Jennifer Egan. She has written a number of novels the usual way. On some kind of computer, using a word-processing program, …
July 31, 2019
Screening Room: ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’
That’s Leonard DiCaprio playing a has-been 1950s Western actor in Quentin Tarantino’s latest, broadest, and potentially strangest genre mash-up. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is playing pretty much everywhere now. My review is at PopMatters: You might have thought Quentin Tarantino would be the last filmmaker to indulge in the lamentable trend of digitally …
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July 28, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Get It Down
A veteran of some pretty horrendous fighting in the Pacific Theater during World War II, Rod Serling suffered from nightmares much of the rest of his life. He also had a deeply-ingrained sense of justice. Both came together in the somewhat maniacal writing schedule he maintained as one of early television’s most acclaimed live teleplay …
July 25, 2019
Reader’s Corner: Indies Support Authors
Colson Whitehead is touring around now to read from his latest novel, The Nickel Boys. While he’ll be going to some chains, he’s a big supporter of indie bookstores. Why? He told Shelf Awareness: My first book was about elevator inspectors, and who is going to support a debut novel by some weird black guy about …
July 22, 2019
Screening Room: ‘The Great Hack’
The Great Hack is a new documentary about how Cambridge Analytica worked with private user data happily served up by Facebook in order to minutely target propaganda that helped win the 2016 election for Donald Trump. Not available on Netflix until this Wednesday, it is already stirring up legal issues in the UK. My review …
July 21, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Be Prepared
Nick Cave, onetime prince of the gothic rock dark arts via his time with the Birthday Party and that killer Wings of Desire cameo, might still be releasing albums and touring with his band but he now fashions himself more writer than rock star. His process seems positively disciplined these days. As he says in …
July 16, 2019
Reader’s Corner: Living in the Worst Place in America
One of the year’s more interesting books is Christopher Ingraham’s If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now. A data reporter for the Washington Post, Ingraham became the focus of some viral blowback after publishing a story in 2015 about how federal government-compiled data showed that Red Lake County in Minnesota was supposedly the worst …
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July 14, 2019
Writer’s Desk: Be Humble, Yet Great
Back in 2010, Wild author and backpacker extraordinaire Cheryl Strayed was still writing the “Dear Sugar” advice column for The Rumpus. She received a lengthy and pained missive from a self-described “high-functioning headcase” who was depressed over not being able to write a book. Strayed’s response is beautiful, funny, dirty, dead-solid-right-on, and worth reading in …
July 13, 2019
Nota Bene: Skip Prime Day?
Next Monday and Tuesday, Amazon is having its annual Prime Day sale (shouldn’t that be Prime Days?). For many, this provides an opportunity to load up on all the consumer goods they want and don’t need (100″ TV, voice-operated device that records everything you say and sends it back to Amazon’s server farms for future …
