Lost Themes III is a true comfort listen, and the most cohesive collection of Carpenter’s original music to be released. Since The Ward flopped in 2010, John Carpenter has worked mostly on his music, notably providing his familiar touch to David Gordon Green’s atrocious…
“Movies don’t scare me” — said a straight-faced and stoical John Carpenter to Mick Garris in a 1982 television interview called “Fear on Film.” (Accompanying Carpenter: gregarious class clown John Landis and David Cronenberg, the latter waxing political and philosophical while Carpenter himself just…
Lopatin’s patchwork panoply of snippets and songs in collision is kaleidoscopic, peaceful, and placating. The purloined production of Daniel Lopatin’s Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, “recorded”/constructed in pandemic-imposed solitude, is suffused with dizzying, sumptuous static redolent of a sibilating station of FM radio (i.e. New…
The only form CYR represents a return to is Corgan’s familiar, tedious navel-gazing and nostalgic rehash. The year is (was) 2020, and Billy Corgan, the Draconian master of alt-rock melancholy, as apt to slam power chord riffs on guitars stacked 40 high as he…
To the casual observer, viewing someone else’s relationship from the outside, there often appears to be a sense of unity, cohesion of the somatic and the soul — from two, one. The lovers themselves, though, know something no one else does: they see the…
Hamilton barely qualifies as a film, losing much of what makes it a stage success in translation, and its historical revisionism feels much murkier in 2020 America. In New York, during the 19th century, there was Broadway, which catered to New York’s more affluent…
Describing Sofia Behrs Tolstaya, a diarist and photographer who remains better known as the wife of Leo Tolstoy, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: “With her mangled intelligence, her operatic, intolerable frenzies of distress, she comes forth still with an almost menacing aliveness, saying it all like…
by Greg Cwik Feature Articles Film Retrospective
Retrospective | Tsai Ming-liang: A Few Long, Lonely Moments
In 1954, a 19-year-old girl named Sylvette David sauntered past Pablo Picasso’s window. The aging artist was instantly beguiled. A few weeks later, he revealed a portrait of David, the first of 60 that he would paint that spring. She became his inspiration, his…
Johnny Jewel’s music is imbued with an eldritch air of nostalgia, the coupling of retro synth-pop and filmic ambiance bringing to mind images of a late night drive along a caliginous road; his production gleams like a rain-slick street, and the recalcitrant synth lines…
When Miles Davis released his seminal 1969 album In a Silent Way, its newfangled, neoteric sound — which Lester Bangs described as “space music” — polarized the musician’s fans. The Jazz purists, much like acoustic Bob Dylan die-hards, were flummoxed by the jarring change even…
