“Once the narration is recognized as arbitrary rather than logical, the viewer is free to ask why individual events within its structures are as they are. The viewer is no longer constrained by conventions of reading to find a meaning or theme within the work as the solution to a sort of puzzle, which has […]
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, there is no talk of higher powers, no lingering on words handed down by deities. The religious leader here is “a man—a hopelessly inquisitive man,” Lancaster Dodd, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and his followers are those who have strayed from the path. Strays are guided back through time […]
Quite often I cover shop. Lazily browsing through rows upon rows, books with great designs entice me to take them off the shelf, peer into the rooms so eloquently promised. Before even attempting a grasp of Harkaway’s worlds, the front door sucked me in. I had no idea what I was in for. Joshua Joseph […]
When I was just out of school and working in food service I hoped there would never be a time when the wish of Robert Crumb – as related to the audience by his wife and fellow artist, Aline, in Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb – to just be a head in a jar would resound so […]
“The function of the creative artist consists of making laws, not in following laws already made.” –Ferruccio Busoni There is an argument—we’ve all heard it—that criticism and creation are fundamentally at odds, despite their hunger for the same endpoint: good art. I used to think this was somewhat reductive and overly simplistic. I’ve always enjoyed […]
