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…
One of the horniest albums ever recorded, Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson is a 28-minute exhalation of libidinous longing. The album tells a Lolita-like tale, partially autobiographical, of the middle-aged musician’s fantasies about, and consequent seduction of, a 15-year-old girl named Melody Nelson, whose bike the man…
A man (bearded, crestfallen) traipses into the woods, where he holes up in a small cabin and writes music about his heartbreak — agonizingly vulnerable, earnest, intimate music, with whispery confessions and guitars so fine and fleeting they could be feelings themselves. Then, the…
Released in the summer of 1983, one year after Steven Spielberg’s E.T and four months after Ronald Reagan unveiled his plan for “Star Wars,” Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is an album at once rooted deeply in its space-obsessed epoch, and yet timeless, ephemeral. It was…
“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then,” Philip K. Dick wrote in A Scanner Darkly. Thom Yorke, modern music’s paranoid soothsayer, has, since OK Computer in 1997, often been called “prescient” for his neurotic, cryptic lyrics, so obsessed with systems of communication, with…
Happiness is becoming of Bill Callahan. Well, maybe not happiness, at least not the rapturous, jump-for-joy kind, but a kind of serene happiness, mellow, content. “Well it’s been such a long time / Why don’t you come on in?” Callahan coos, in that sotto…
