“Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic…
The Cambridge Film Festival is on at the moment and last night I attended one of its main events — a live interview with director Stephen Frears, followed by a screening of his latest film Tamara Drewe, adapted from the graphic novel by Posey Simmonds. It was a good time — Frears mixed self-deprecation and…
The picks of the week from around the web. Ray Davis: “High, Low and Lethem”. Great essay about the continuing confluence of high and low culture and the transformation of that modernist dichotomy, which touches upon auteur theory, copyright issues and much more. (Thanks Tim!) Comics! Ron Regé’s great “We Must Know, We Will Know”…
As explained here the other day, there’s currently a public debate raging in Denmark about drawn and animated child pornography, triggered in part by the opening of an exhibition on the topic in the city of Odense, in part by the conviction in Sweden of a manga translator alleged to have possessed drawn images of…
The highly publicized child pornography conviction last month of a Swedish translator, for possessing manga which allegedly depicted sexualised minors or minors engaging in sexual acts, is but the latest manifestation of a debate concerning what constitutes child pornography that has been going for a number of years. The chairman of the Swedish Comics Society,…
“Think, for example, of Northrop Frye. Frye’s is now a name that you never hear mentioned but which was then everywhere. CS Lewis, who is now famous for fairy stories, was then famous for being a scholar. Tolkien too was famous for being a scholar, not for elves and so on. There is no prestige…
The inimitable ‘Li Se’, in whose “extended network” I find myself, has finally opened the floodgates and is committing to writing the kind of intellectual effluvium that people in said network have come to appreciate in conversation over the years. Written on the principle, appropriated from Charles Bukowski, of ‘not trying’, it is blogging as…
Dennis Hopper RIP.
This wicked little film by Andreas Wykade sums up my state of mind this cartoon-crazed week pretty accurately. Sleep well…
The picks of the week from around the web. London Review of Books: “The Darwin Show” Steven Shapin examines the phenomenon that was the Darwin year, the multifarious contexts in which Darwin takes centre stage these years, as well as the man and his work in this bravura effort. David Bordwell: “Kurosawa’s Early Spring”. A…
A short note on the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man. It seems to me that this incisive fable about one man’s search for answers is the equivalent of the filmmakers handing us the keys to their art. Only now, after 25 years of making movies, have they created an overtly Jewish film. Characters such as…
Next week it’s time for this year’s CPH:DOX — the great international documentary festival held annually in Copenhagen. It’s always worth checking out the programme, and I urge you especially to consider two of the films being screened there, if nothing else because I can vouch for some of the people involved. Firstly, director Ada…
Obama’s career up to now, lucky as it was, had been wanting in singular achievements for which he alone was responsible. His experience seems not to have taught him the law of natural selection in politics by which majorities are put together out of remainders. Any act that achieves something concrete will leave small multitudes…
The picks of the week from around the web. David Bordwell on Inglourious Basterds. A great piece on one of the year’s (surprisingly) great movies. Read it. Also, check out Jim Emerson’s somewhat rambling, but thoughtful comments and the interesting debate that follows them. Michael Dooley on Harvey Kurtzman. Good essay introducing the master satirist/cartoonist,…
Peter Madsen og — formoder jeg — Henning Kure, der netop har afsluttet deres store Valhalla-projekt, vil i morgen, fredag d. 18 mellem kl. 16.00-18.00, være at finde i Fantask, hvor de vil signere det nye album Vølvens syner og deres andre tegneserier. Hvis du gik glip af seancen i Faraos i sidste uge, er…