It was always gonna be hard after PAN’S LABYRINTH. Guillermo de Toro made his major market entrance with such rich visual language and a fabulist storyteller’s gift for imbuing the fairy tale with the mundane grit of human history. Since then some things have worked (THE SHAPE OF WATER) while others felt like that visual…
ABIGAIL and NOSFERATU
At long last saw both Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s ABIGAIL, and Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU. The former is as fun as horror movies get. Nodding to everything from THE BAD SEED to FRIGHT NIGHT, PANIC ROOM to FROM DUSK TIL DAWN it’s a clown car of horror silliness. Occasionally super-scary and DEAD ALIVE levels of…
Autechre, and how a lot of uncool people loved hip hop.
Throughout the mid- and late-nineties a lot of us raised on LOVELESS and QUIQUE, became disillusioned with our favorite artists. Autechre, then Bjork, Seefeel, then Goldie. They became artists with audiences of the mind. We could go there, but there were no promises of hooks, best new thing, or nudity. It was as if, rather…
Colombian ajiaco.
This started to snowball after I saw J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s recipe on YouTube. You should follow him if you don’t already. I think the world of his stoicism, his proliferate scientific method, and, of course, his candor about addiction issues in the food industry. The problem I ran into—not limited to this recipe, is that…
Green beans in the style of gumbo.
Western food is so pock-marked with stupid regional rules and arbitrary distinctions that often make home cooking feel more like coloring in the lines (or else!) rather than enjoying the natural progression of a dish—classic or new-fangled, for what in it appeals to you as a human being with a mouth. Case in point, I…
The taste of black licorice.
Sacking out thinking of the state of vinyl. I gotta be up early, so I’ll keep this short. Tomorrow is Record Store Day, which I’ll faithfully avoid. Today I picked up thirty-year-ish anniversary reissues of Seefeel’s QUIQUE and Unrest’s PERFECT TEETH. Tomorrow I’ll sell some light rotation records for Verve’s A STORM IN HEAVEN. It…
What if it was Haydn, instead of Mozart…
Upon revisiting Milos Forman’s AMADEUS, after forty years since it premiered (and nearly as long since I first saw it) how history got rearranged in his favor. Listening to classical radio, catching Mozart’s music in other movies, tv, advertising, and miscellaneous pop culture, broadly, there was, and still is, a sense that we live in…
Birds of North America.
Shonda Rhimes’ neoliberal whodunnit, THE RESIDENCE, made for a satisfying farewell to my Netflix subscription. Money is bad, and Netflix simply isnt that good. Like any donor-class producer, Rhimes moves me to contempt for her glib, topical sense of humor and gratitude for the balm of that humor. It’s complicated. THE RESIDENCE is a murder…
Hey! Luciani.
This was a dream. And how I discovered all my paintings are the picture of Dorian Gray. I’m gonna cross wires a bit here, so if you have questions ask away. I’ll do my best to correspond. An honor ceremony for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote the children’s classic, THE LITTLE PRINCE. I was there…
Chrysleriana 