Posts Tagged ‘celebrity’

Counterpoint: Abramovic Redux (Part Deux) [AKA: "If You Love Your Fun, Die for It!"]

I enjoyed the Flickr photostream accompanying Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art, though of course I didn’t look at all of it, maybe seven or eight or ten pages.  Often enough, one of the interesting things about Abramovic’s work is the way it involves her audience.  In the photographs, at least, looking [...]

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Blink and you’ll miss it

If you haven’t heard about Marina Abramovic’s performance piece accompanying the MoMA’s “The Artist is Present” retrospective, the gist is this: Abramovic sits in a chair.  A museumgoer sits in a chair opposite.  They stare at each other for as long as the visitor wishes to stay, from eight seconds to eight hours.  The visitor [...]

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The Part About the Critics

To drag fiction toward the unknown he had to go there himself, and then invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results of his work are multi-dimensional, in a way that runs ahead of a critic’s one-at-a-time powers of description. I know, I know: you should never [...]

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How to screw up a Hollywood adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel. Again.

Two nights ago I finished Jim Thompson’s The Getaway.  I’m a sold fan of Jim Thompson’s works — I cherish each page as I turn them, even his clunker novels.  I went all the way to the near-end of The Getaway wondering why I was bothering.  Doc McCoy is not nearly a colorful character as [...]

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“That’ll Be Two Dollars and Fifty Cents Please” by Myla Goldberg

Published in Harpers, March 2010.  Story available here (registration required). Myla Goldberg’s “That’ll Be Two Dollars and Fifty Cents Please” is a story about lost youth and lost glamour, and while we’re at it, it’s a story about American free enterprise.  Over the course of five pages we’re introduced to two residents of a small [...]

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