In China, A Persistent Thorn In The State's Side
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...
View ArticleHow 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.
View ArticleBeing '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...
View ArticlePortis '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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleRevisiting, 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...
View ArticleA 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,...
View ArticleVoting 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...
View ArticleA 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...
View ArticleHunting 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...
View ArticlePeeling 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...
View Article'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...
View Article'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...
View ArticleAddictive '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...
View ArticleAussie 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...
View Article'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...
View ArticleFemale 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...
View Article'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...
View ArticleFrustrating 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...
View ArticleThree 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...
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