Of all the major metropolitan cities in America, none deserve the misanthrope’s fury more than Los Angeles. After all, what urban area better represents the false promises of contemporary American Dreams than the one that declares you’re special and deserve your own TV show, only to exchange that dangling carrot for a dishwasher’s rag or [...]
When we consider a society of grotesque economic contrasts, Paris, autumn, 1788, is a fine starting point. France had its own 99%–in fact, less than one half of one percent of the population belonged to a noble family. They sequestered themselves in large estates or the proverbial ivory tower. Imagine starving mobs roaming septic gutters [...]
Because we live in a 24-hour news cycle you’ve probably heard the story slipped in somewhere between nuclear contamination fears, carnage in Afghanistan and sexual indiscretions of Republican candidates—2005 YU55, a massive asteroid four hundred meters in diameter will pass within the orbit of the moon on November 8th. It’s the closest an asteroid this [...]
“You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.” — Jodorowsky’s Alchemist Cinema was developed more than a hundred years ago with purely entertainment purposes in mind: it was a way for an entrepreneur to make a buck. However, it didn’t take the State too long to discover its manifest possibilities as a tool of [...]
“Everybody passing through here is somebody, if nobody in the outside world.” — Patti Smith, Just Kids In one of my favorite scenes in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee [...]
That Jonathan Franzen’s fourth novel, Freedom, debuted at #1 on the Fiction section of the New York Times Bestsellers List in September last year is one of those phenomenal outliers that defy the logic of free market capitalism. It’s not that it has no business being #1 when the spot is usually held by the [...]