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Stuff We Like

  • The Vice Guide to North Korea

    North Korea

    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

  • The Art of Marco Fusinato

    Marco Fusinato

    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's Old Face

    Dr. Gina Toll

    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

From the Vault

Things that died in 2008.

Our president pledged as primary candidate to staunchly defend individual civil liberties and curb the domestic intelligence abuses of the Bush Administration. As the Democratic candidate, he hedged. As president-elect, he made stunning about-faces, notably on immunity for telecommunications companies who cooperated with Bush's illegal requests. Now, as president, he's continued as many of Bush's abuses as he's curtailed. Also, there was a time when John McCain wasn't an unprincipled, dishonorable bigot. He was quite the man, when he was a man. Then came a succubus to hasten his by then inevitable decline.

Feb 2, 2010

Too Big to Fail

Darren Franich

Too Big to Fail

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail is the Wall Street Book of the Moment, capturing the recession zeitgeist as surely as Barbarians at the Gate caught the go-go ’80s wave of corporate takeovers in a steroid-pumped bull market.  Sorkin’s narrative is incredibly complex, reconfiguring the economic crisis as a kind of white-collar version of The Wire, with a dizzying array of various forces (investment banks like Goldman and Lehman, government agencies like Treasury and the Fed, and companies like Fannie Mae that sit uneasily between the two) all racing to avoid an economic apocalypse, like Norse gods trying desperately to stall Ragnarok. There are juicy details (like the CEO with a daily helicopter commute) and fascinating character studies (like the slow-burn corrosion of Lehman Brothers’ Dick Fuld, whose manic descent into paranoia is a King Lear narrative for our time), but more fascinating is the portrait of dozens of brilliant minds and trillions of dollars wrestling with disaster so all-encompassing it begins to seem existential. Too Big To Fail doesn’t necessarily make the economic crisis easier to understand, but it does leave the reader with a cold-comfort bit of wisdom: the people who were supposed to anticipate the crisis don’t understand it, either.  – Darren Franich

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