‘Rock’ in a Hard Place ‘Rock’ in a Hard Place
Not since Charlton Heston painted the Sistine Chapel has there been so epic a film about arts patronage as Cradle Will Rock. Heston, you will recall, had to cope only with the Va...
Dec 9, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Exploding Plastic Inevitable Exploding Plastic Inevitable
The fifties may have been the last great moment when Americans entrusted their dreams of transformation to the material world.
Dec 9, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Joanne Jacobson
Kosovo: On Ends and Means Kosovo: On Ends and Means
The spectacle of human beings acting out mindless violence through pack behavior instills more terror in the heart than perhaps any other event in the natural world.
Dec 9, 1999 / Books & the Arts / George Kenney
Stop-Time in the Levant Stop-Time in the Levant
It is remarkable to what extent almost anything having to do with the Middle East in this country--be it political, cultural, historical or even personal--is permeated by the tri...
Dec 2, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Ammiel Alcalay
Algren’s Question Algren’s Question
He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station-house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his head across his arms upon the query-...
Dec 2, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Dan Simon
Back to Beginnings Back to Beginnings
Cheick Oumar Sissoko, who lives and works in Mali, has looked around and noticed that his fellow filmmakers in sub-Saharan Africa are few--"and due to our financial need (great w...
Dec 2, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir
The author of this review is the son of a zek: My father barely survived his deportation to a Siberian camp in Vorkuta.
Nov 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Singer
How Now, Iron Johns? How Now, Iron Johns?
In Growing Up Absurd, his classic polemic on shortchanged youth, Paul Goodman remarks, parenthetically, that "the problems I want to discuss in this book belong primarily, in our...
Nov 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Ellen Willis
‘Our’ Gide? ‘Our’ Gide?
Whenever Gide wrote or spoke about himself directly, which was not infrequently, he would insist that his wars within were to be traced to his very genes.
Nov 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Patrick Smith