Dispatches

Why The Innocents Is the Halloween Movie You Need

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.’

Gerhard Richter

How Three Gerhard Richter Canvases Speak to Our Moment

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…

“You can be an outlaw and be anything you want”: A Memory of Lester Bowie

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.

Not Being John Malkovich: TCR at the DNC

The reporter was the same height as John Malkovich, and baldheaded, and got a similar pissy look on his face when he was tired. (Malkovich grew up 15 miles from where the reporter grew up.) The reporter felt as if he looked like John Malkovich in that movie where he was walking through the crowd in a station, trying to look normal, but doing it so obviously that Bruce Willis just had to laugh.

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