From Dave Kehr’s New York Times review:
Is “Mr. Arkadin” a brilliant piece of prepostmodernist “appropriation,” recycling past achievements into a Wellesian meta-movie? Or is it just a mess, reflecting the difficulty Welles was experiencing as he tried to restart his failed American career in Europe?
Isn’t the word for prepostmodernist just modernist?
In case you didn’t know, I’ve been selected for Philebrity Fit Club thus cancelling my membership to The Sedentary Life Affiliates, a fraternity to which I’d clung lo these six years, transferring membership from New York to Pennsport.
So as not to bog down Blackmail Is My Life with a daily accounting of foodstuffs, running, sundry aches and the pharmacology that keeps it all together, I’ve launched with a great measure of Pennsport Pride This Sporting Life at Myspace. Visit there if you’d like to keep tabs, but I’ll probably include a weekly link every Saturday through June 17th, accompanied by a picture of these new sneakers as they endure more wear and tear.
From New York Times:
“I thought he handled his assignment with class, integrity,” the president said. “It’s going to be hard to replace Scott, but nevertheless he made the decision and I accepted it. One of these days, he and I are going to be rocking in chairs in Texas and talking about the good old days.”
Ari Berman comments. Somewhere, Calvin Coolidge chuckles.
The Flaming Lips — At War with the Mystics
The Flaming Lips’ At War with the Mystics tells a pessimistic political story. Beginning with the unfortunately titled “Yeah Yeah Yeah Songâ€Â, they question human nature and assume the worst: that baser elements win out in the secular cosmology and that our impulses are inherently self-interested, a ceaseless chorus of annoying yeahs seems to signal acquiescence. If that’s true, it’s a damning indictment coming from a band heretofore so preoccupied with hallucinogens that politics seemed but a passing concern. So has Wayne Coyne’s protective bubble suddenly burst and let in the awful world, the one where the other half lives?
Thus “style” was born: this was Flaubert’s second gift to novelists, and one they are as likely to curse him for as to thank him. Of course, writers before Flaubert had agonized about style: don’t we feel that Jane Austen was a ruthless censor of superfluity? But no novelist agonized as much or as publicly, no novelist fetishized the poetry of the sentence in the same way, no novelist pushed to such an extreme the potential alienation of form and content (a book “about nothing”).
The Godhead, revealed.