A couple of months ago, I visited Beijing, and like so many before me, I was stunned by how hypercapitalist Communist China has become — the hundreds of glossy highrises, the countless shops selling Prada and Apple, the traffic jams filled with brand new Audis. You felt you could be in L.A. or Tokyo — until you wanted some information. Then you discovered that Facebook was permanently blocked, certain words in Google searches always crashed your browser, and, as my wife joked, it was easier to buy a Rolls-Royce than a real newspaper.
In China, A Persistent Thorn In The State's Side
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How Brazil Lives Now, In 'Neighboring Sounds'
Between mass tourism and the Internet, it's never been easier to learn about other cultures. Yet we often stay on the surface.
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Being 'Joseph Anton,' Rediscovering Salman Rushdie
In the fall of 1989, I was walking down a London street when someone handed me a flier that asked, "Should Rushdie Die?" The following afternoon, I headed over to the Royal Albert Hall to hear that question answered by a renowned Islamic scholar.
Waiting to get in, I began talking to a group of young Muslims of Pakistani origin wearing Air Jordans, listening to Public Enemy on their boombox and talking with East London accents. They could hardly have seemed more Westernized, but when I asked if they thought Rushdie should be killed, they said, "Yes." He had insulted the word of God.
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Portis 'Miscellany' Makes A High-'Velocity' Collection
Whenever I hear someone called a "cult writer," my hackles jump toward the ceiling. It's not only that the phrase calls up images of self-congratulatory hipsters, but that writers who become cultish tend to do so because their work is steeped in bizarro sex, graphic violence, trippy weirdness or half-baked philosophy.
The grand exception is my favorite American writer, 78-year-old Charles Portis, who could hardly be less hip. This ex-Marine loves cars, knows guns, can't stand hippies and lives off the media radar in Little Rock, Ark., without being famous for trying not to be famous.
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The New British Empire: Pop-Culture Powerhouses
It seems that every time you turn around, you find another anniversary of some big cultural or historical event. I'm weary of the media's habit of playing all these things up, so I'm abashed to admit I'm about to do just that.
But you see, in the same three-day period I recently saw the new James Bond picture, Skyfall, and Crossfire Hurricane, a new HBO documentary about The Rolling Stones.
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Revisiting, Reappraising Cimino's 'Heaven's Gate'
The director Francois Truffaut once remarked that it takes as much time and energy to make a bad movie as to make a good one. He was right, but I would add one thing: It takes extraordinary effort to make a truly memorable flop.
The best example is Heaven's Gate, the hugely expensive 1980 movie by Michael Cimino that is the most famous cinematic disaster of my lifetime.
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A Mystery That Explores 'The Rage' Of New Ireland
The Irish novelist John McGahern once remarked that his country stayed a 19th-century society for so long that it nearly missed the 20th century. But in the mid-1990s, Ireland's economy took off, turning the country from a poor backwater into a so-called Celtic Tiger with fancy restaurants, chrome-clad shops and soaring real estate values. The country was transformed — until things came tumbling down during the 2008 financial crisis.
This rapid rise and even rapider fall may have taken its toll on ordinary people, but it was a godsend for a mystery writer.
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Voting Pinochet Out Was More Than Just A Yes Or 'No'
These days politics and advertising go hand in hand. Mayors stage photo ops. The Bush administration compared the Iraq war to rolling out a new product. And just last year, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent nearly a billion dollars running for president. If you're an American, such wall-to-wall marketing has come to seem a natural phenomenon, like Hurricane Sandy or LeBron James.
Of course, it's not natural. It's as man-made as any building. I've never seen this shown any more clearly than in No, the Oscar-nominated film by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain.
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A Measured Look At Roth As The Writer Turns 80
In Chinua Achebe's novel The Anthills of the Savannah, one of the characters says, "Poets don't give prescriptions. They give headaches."
The same is true of novelists, and none more so than Philip Roth. If any writer has ever enjoyed rattling people's skulls, it's this son of Newark, N.J., who's currently enjoying something of a victory lap in the media on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
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Hunting For Secrets In 'The Shining's' Room 237
Awhile back, I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see its show on filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. It was jammed with visitors poring over his letters, eyeing the dresses worn by the spooky twins in The Shining, and posing for photos in front of the sexy-futuristic decor of the Korova Milk Bar from A Clockwork Orange.
Although I was surprised at the crowd, I shouldn't have been. Kubrick is one of the rare dead directors — Hitchcock is another — whose work is still watched by those younger than 40.
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Peeling Away The Layers In A 'Portrait Of Jason'
If reality TV has a redeeming value, it's that it teaches you to be suspicious of claims that you're seeing real people doing real things. This is especially so in an age when memoirs bristle with made-up events, and everyone from the Kardashians to the Obamas orchestrate their media coverage.
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'The Bling Ring': Celebrity Culture And Its Little Monsters
We live in a world filled with crimes, but most of them don't have much to tell us. They're cases of mere stupidity, cruelty or greed. But every now and then one comes along that invites larger thoughts about the culture.
Think of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, stabbed to death while nearly 40 witnesses heard her screams but didn't want to get involved. Or the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst, which felt like the final, mad curdling of the '60s political dream. Or the Ponzi scheming of Bernard Madoff, that hollow pillar of the community who came to personify the 2008 financial crisis.
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'My Lunches With Orson' Puts You At The Table With Welles
If you asked me to name my favorite movie scene, I'd choose the one in Citizen Kane when newspaper owner Charles Foster Kane steals his rivals' best reporters, then throws a party in his own honor. As musicians literally sing his praises, we watch Kane dance with chorus girls wearing a look of radiant delight. It's a moment bursting with promise and cockiness and joie de vivre, made all the more exuberant because Kane's pleasure is so obviously shared by Welles himself.
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Addictive 'Infatuations' Takes A Metaphysical Look At Crime
If you're like me, you probably feel exhausted just thinking about how much cultural stuff is out there. A friend recently told me he was reading an acclaimed Hungarian novelist whose books I've never opened. "Please tell me he stinks," I begged, "so I don't have to read him."
"Actually, he's great," came the reply, and I groaned.
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Aussie Detective Jack Irish Is More Than Old-School Macho
When Raymond Chandler first set Philip Marlowe walking down the mean streets of L.A., he couldn't have imagined that eventually every city, from ancient Athens to 21st century Bangkok, would have its own detective series. Of course, they're not all equally good.
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'Masters Of Sex' Get Unmasterful Treatment On Showtime
Way back in the 1950s — before people tweeted snapshots of their privates or posted their hookup diaries online — it was considered inappropriate to talk too much about sex. The guardians of culture treated it as something better kept in the dark.
Two pioneers who helped bring sexuality into the light were William Masters and his colleague turned wife, Virginia Johnson, who became perhaps the '60s' unlikeliest icons.
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Female Friendship Puts 'New' Angle On Italian Classism And Machismo
Some writers you read and move on, but every now and then you read one whose work knocks you back against the wall. This happened to me with the great Italian novelist Elena Ferrante.
I first encountered her through her scalding 2002 novel, The Days Of Abandonment, whose narrator, Olga, may be the scariest jilted wife since Medea.
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'Great Beauty,''Narco Cultura': Excess, Succeeding Wildly
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake served up one of those mind-bending proverbs he's known for: "The road of excess leads," he wrote, "to the palace of wisdom." I thought about this line as I watched two terrific new movies that put Blake's words to the test.
Paolo Sorrentino's thrillingly good The Great Beauty tackles the idea head-on — it's an excessive film about excess. Sorrentino doesn't merely aim to update one of the most famous movies of all time (Fellini's portrait of decadent Rome, La Dolce Vita).
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Frustrating Heroine Stars In Fresh, Feminist 'Nightingale'
There's an unforgettable moment in the diary of the great Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. He's on the beach and he spots a beetle that's been blown on its back by the wind and now lies there helplessly, legs wiggling, unable to right itself. Gombrowicz saves it by turning it over. He sees another upside-down beetle, and turns it over. Then, another. Looking along the sand, he realizes that there are so many beetles he can't possibly save them all. Eventually, he gives up trying.
Most of us would do the same. But not everyone is capable of stopping.
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Three Protesters, One 'Square': Film Goes Inside Egypt's Revolution
A revolution is a bit like a writing a mystery novel. It's hard to start but even harder to come up with a satisfying ending.
They're still working on that in Egypt. Three years after the toppling of dictator Hosni Mubarak — the crowning moment of the Arab Spring — the army's running the country again; the elected president, Mohammed Morsi, has been arrested and charged with treason; the Muslim Brotherhood has been banned; and Tahrir Square's secular protesters are getting arrested.
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