A rich, deep evocation of… Well, it’s something of a cliché to say ‘the movement of the earth’, or ‘geology’,…
A bleak disturbance
Humphrey Bogart reputedly occupied something of a lonely place among his Hollywood peers—although he had his good friends, Louise Brooks,…
Full marks
I hesitate to say too much about Karl Marx or Marxism in response to a book written by someone who…
Staring back
Darkness, an absence of light, is an obvious, unavoidable presence in the visual realm. We live in a world of…
Craft and language
Coen Brothers genre pieces are rarely without an ironic twist or two, a knowing nod to the implausibilities of the…
The city is not a city
A city is a complex organism. An ‘urbanist’ is a kind of sociologist, which suggests that to those who make…
Balancing act
So what happens when you take one of the most distinctive and stylish rhythm sections of the post-punk era and…
We don’t need no stinking…
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a film that’s been lurking in my brain since childhood, having been on…
Everlasting uncertainty
Having watched a lot of Coen Brothers movies lately, I’m starting to see their kind of purposefully aimless plotting as…
Sharing the fun
Herbie Hancock was right at the beginning of his career as a sideman when he made his debut recording as…
One face in a thousand
In Rhetorics of Fantasy, her important structural taxonomy of fantasy literature, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four key types of fantasy, defined…
The past present serious tense
Roger Deakins’s brilliant cinematography has been conspicuous in some of the Coen Brothers’s films—in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for…
What punk is for
A lot of the time, I listen to contemporary punk records, and I wonder where the anger’s coming from. I…
Upended trajectories
At the point at which Burn After Reading was released, the Coen Brothers had a certain amount of form, in…
