This brilliant and disturbing documentary takes you deep into the shallows of Kim Jong Il’s hermit kingdom. Somehow, Vice Magazine’s Shane Smith (founder of VBS, Vice’s video division and star of their Guide to Travel series) and a clandestine-camera-wielding companion secure passage into North Korea from China -- pretending to be tourists, of course, because journalists go to jail. For an hour Smith explores the thin, saccharine veneer of majesty and might that the dictatorship uses to obscure the truth about the desperately impoverished and broken country. He mingles with eerily upbeat hosts, waitresses and tour guides, all hand-picked to chaperone him 24/7 during his stay (the pretense of which is to view and report on the Arirang Mass Games, a spectacular orgy of propaganda and gymnastics too baffling for words). Complete with a heartbreakingly awkward karaoke rendition of the Sex Pistol’s "Anarchy in the U.K.," this documentary is a must-see: a visceral primer for anyone interested in understanding the uniquely other-worldly yet backwards North Korea. -- Adam Schaefer
Music, math, the interactive: these are three things that I really like, and Marco Fusinato's art includes them all. Mass Black Implosion is probably my favorite of his projects -- it reimagines musical scores, sometimes by overlaying them with scribbles of varying thickness (maps to some imagined territory), in architecturally-precise lines (an explosion into three dimensions), or as some kind of gloriously strange infographic for the world to come. Aetheric Plexus, in sharp contrast, turns audiovisual detail into interactive assault. It's difficult to get a sense of the scope of some of these works, but it's evident that Fusinato's gallery showings include a vast collaborative and musical component -- I'd love a chance to see some of this stuff live -- and I'm quite taken with his curatorial series You Don't Have to Call it Music, which tasks visual artists to create music. -- Lauren Caldwell
Dianne Wiest first struck me as the standout of Hannah and Her Sisters; then as the Law & Order DA who tells Sam Waterston what to do and how to think. She aged between these roles and now is even older, the offbeat beauty of her youth having morphed into a mature visage of both astonishing expressiveness and grandmotherly inscrutability — a crucial element of her facile and felicitous performance as psychotherapist Gina Toll on HBO's In Treatment. Psychotherapy is a delicate, hyper-pressurized encounter in which change rests on an enduringly empathetic therapist (who is also capable of being perceived as such) imbuing contingent actions and words with novel meanings and potentialities. Gina's patient Paul, a former protégé who returns for guidance after a decade of estrangement that began when Gina denied him a promotion, is ever probing Gina's face for nefariousness. A sleepy spider lying in wait, is what Paul calls her: What secret motives lie covertly in the fragile folds of her jowls, in the puffy bags beneath her eyes, etched on her weblike cheeks? Her enigmatic expressions initially offend Paul, whose history with Gina predisposes him to read any ambiguity in her mien as perfunctorily negative. Not sharing this pervading bias, we enjoy the virtuosic, Emmy-winning face of this gorgeous old lady whose allure and gravitas make me want to ask her to run for president. -- Kevin Hilke
Apr 29, 2009 1
Behold, the Lord’s Prayer in Old English:
Fæder úre, ðú ðe eart on heofonum,
Sí ðín nama ġehálgod.
Tó becume ðín riċe.
Ġewurþe ðín willa
On eorþan swá swá on heofonum.
Urne ġedæghwamlíċan hlaf syle ús tódæġ.
And forgyf ús úre gyltas,
Swá swá wé forgyfaþ úrum gyltendum.
And ne ġelæd ðú ús on costnunge,
Ac álýs ús of yfele. Sóþliċe.
You may call me a [...]
Apr 26, 2009 1
Pages upon pages of John Galt self-righteously sneering at all the ‘looters’ (socialists, vegetarians, Christians, liberals, Buddhists, academics, environmentalists, Mexicans, etc.) seem not only like a pathetic attempt to overwhelm a reader who would be impressed by the volume of pages, but also like the product of a small mind. John Galt’s cheery speech was more than my well meaning young-Republican-lite ideology could take. Rand helpfully packaged this ideology in weapons-grade concentration and laid it all out for easy scrutiny and swift rejection.
Apr 24, 2009 0
In response to the essay The Virtues of Rational Religious Belief, by Jason Finley and Kevin Hilke.
I’d like to thank Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke for their willingness to have this exchange. As much as our opinions may differ, I believe it’s important that we keep them open to discussion; I have encountered far too [...]
Apr 19, 2009 0
In January, The Nation published a discursive but fruitful memoiristic essay by Ted Solotaroff, who spent a career in political and literary editing beginning at Commentary in the ideologically tumultuous 1960s. It is illuminating for anyone interested in this period, when the nation’s intellectual heft began to swing decidedly to the right, a swing that determined the political and social structures of our own period, and so one instructive to those who wish to map, influence, or create the political and social structures of the future. Solotaroff gets us inside the heads of some of the people whose contingent decisions and actions set that formation in motion. While the first half of Solotaroff’s piece treats the politics of internecine midcentury literary-political editing, the second traces his relationships with his later writers—after his estrangement from the supercilious Podhoretz and much of the intelligensia that gathered around him—notably Cynthia Ozick and, hugely, the subjectively-unhinged critic, fiction writer, and jetsetting homosexual intellectual Alfred Chester, whose peripatetic life as a self-declared immoralist, vexed by poverty, alienation, and aberrant desire, ultimately made him into a searing and prescient queer moralist.
Apr 12, 2009 1
There is an old joke about easing yourself into a conversation in a party: all you have to do is walk up and say “Yes, but where do you draw the line?” and you will immediately find yourself right at the heart of the discussion. The reason this is funny, and the reason it works, is that most everything worth discussing is a continuum phenomenon. Issues are rarely a matter of ‘black and white,’ yet everyone seems to have an opinion about where one thing ends and another begins. Yet in today’s politics, we are quick to throw out a final answer and call it a day. Issues like gay marriage and abortion pose difficult questions characteristically because there is no simple answer. We should approach these dilemmas with sensitivity befitting of their difficulty.
