The seasonal drill of watching endless horror films is so familiar to Halloween lovers that it is a good idea to remind ourselves that horror films once aspired to tingle our spines, not lash our senses. To experience that vintage sense of unease we must return to the classics. Perhaps no other film makes that case better than director Jack Clayton’s 1961 masterpiece, ‘The Innocents.’
In my day we said we were “going to go do something.” You felt like seeing a movie, you went to see a movie. People now talking about how they feel weird reading a book alone in a restaurant. Pfffft. I determined to show myself a real good time.
The new documentary ‘Taking Venice,’ directed by Amei Wallach, tells the story of that intrigue with original footage, recent interviews, some recreations, and a snappy jazz-funk soundtrack à la ‘Ocean’s Eleven.’
Truckloads of paintings and artworks attempt to depict or advocate political and historical events and eras. The Romans constructed arches to commemorate military victories for the foundation and building of empire. Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) rings a collective bell inside our national head every time we…
I knew Lester Bowie had been dead for a long time, and I think I know that dead people do not get up and dance at the funerals of people they have loved. But I never could escape an eerie feeling. I felt that Lester would twirl into the sanctuary behind the Bosman Twins, his signature white coat flowing open, waving his shining trumpet and finally blowing it with the voices of edgy angels.
William H. Gass was, as everyone notes, known more widely as a novelist and essayist than a philosopher, but his literary prose showed analytic philosophy’s interest in language, image, and metaphor, which he made cool.
Flea was always moving. True to his name, he never stood still for long. Indeed, you could say he flitted. He was smiling at you and slapping your back or hugging you, he connected with you, but, it always seemed, briefly.
I tried to avoid this show. Then I succumbed.
It is predictable, but also true, to say that the Iliad makes poetry out of war and conflict. It is more precise to say that the Iliad reminds us that war and conflict are always with us, whether in open conflagration and mounting body counts or simmering beneath the surface.
When Bobby Kirksey bought Jacobsmeyers—already a legacy tavern in Granite City—he made it clear to his musician friends that his tavern was open to us. He meant it.