Entertainment
Top 10 TV shows of the decade
The 2000s signaled a new day in television. Gone were the mushy family sitcoms of yesteryear, as new, sarcastic comedy took their place. The hour-long, tear-jerking dramas were replaced by gritty, hard-edged realism while sentimental characters were consumed by a ...
The benevolent creator
A Dasha Shishkin drawing is by no means straightforward. A picture can show multiple scenes, dozens of characters — some big, some small, some with...
Love in the time of communism
Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
And if you want to be free, be free.
’Cause there’s a million things to be
You know...
If I could fight
Dear diary,
I felt a new emotion
after weeks on end
of nothing but fatigue;
it was hatred
for the human race
It's been getting worse
after coming so...
Decoding the Master
By its very nature, cinema is a collaborative art. As Orson Welles said, “A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.” To whom then does a movie belong? In his 1954 essay, “A certain tendency in French cinema,” the young critic, ...
Circular logic
Writer/director Rian Johnson is fantastic at making pretty good movies. 2005’s Brick was a slyly conceived yarn that took 1940s private dick dialogue and plot and affixed them to a modern high-school setting, with middling effect. 2008’s The Brothers Bloom was a ...
Putting down another piece in the Jorma Kaukonen puzzle
If you think of Jorma Kaukonen’s career as a jigsaw puzzle, the whole thing sort of makes sense. It began as a pile of disjointed pieces containing just a hint or color of things to come. Each day, each year, each decade the puzzle becomes more complete. Every new ...
