February 2020 – recycled paper clips

Beanpole: 8/10

Beanpole is a strong film. The most obvious thing that makes it stick out is the choice to focus on the moment after the war. Like The Odyssey which portrays a survivor’s attempt to return to normalcy after the disruption of the Trojan War, so Kantemir Balagov chooses to set his story after the “end.”Continue reading “Beanpole: 8/10”

A First Glance at: “First Person” Putin’s Self-Portrait

So far (I’m about half-way in) “Volodya” as he is mostly called, seems to be a fairly typical product of his environment. As he himself says, “I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education,” an interesting remark because it implies that he at least partially sees through that patriotic brainwashing, andContinue reading “A First Glance at: “First Person” Putin’s Self-Portrait”

Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates: An update on “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration”

Ta-Nehisi Coates first published “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” in October of 2015. Four and a half years and an important prison reform law (the First Step Act) have passed, how much has changed? There seems to have been some improvement. Not only has the total incarceration rate dropped, but theContinue reading “Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates: An update on “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration””

Speak, Memory: Worth Reading, but not a Must Read

Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” has been called “The finest autobiography written in our time.” This is certainly an exaggeration. As with Pale Fire, Nabokov is pleasant reading (given a free afternoon in the middle of winter, plenty of strong black tea, nothing else to do, and ideally a warm, crackling fire). He is a writer ofContinue reading “Speak, Memory: Worth Reading, but not a Must Read”

Winter Mushrooms: Indiana

Art According to Ta-Nehisi Coates

Reading through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “We Were Eight Years in Power,” I came across an incredible paragraph in which he describes the aesthetic he absorbed from Nas’s “One Love.” “Art was not an after-school special. Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyoneContinue reading “Art According to Ta-Nehisi Coates”

Tolstoy’s Absolutism: Strength or Weakness?

Part I. One of the most distinctive characteristics of Tolstoy, both in his actual life and in his literary fictions, was his absolutism. As we know from his wife’s diaries, whenever Tolstoy embraced a passion, whether it was beekeeping, war, agriculture, philosophy, politics, or writing, he embraced it totally; and when he grew disinterested inContinue reading “Tolstoy’s Absolutism: Strength or Weakness?”

Dead Man

Dead Man A Review: 5/10 Dead Man, the 1995 film directed by Jim Jarmusch, is essentially a classic Western made more palatable to the 90s by a trendy admixture of decadence. The underlying myth, the fundamental ideology has not changed. It in no way challenges the traditional narrative, or acknowledges that narrative as problematic. OurContinue reading “Dead Man”