Slog - The Stranger's Blog

Line Out

The Music Blog

« More Intraoffice E-mail | Live! Nude! Wizards! »

Friday, July 28, 2006

Arts in America

Posted by on July 28 at 12:36 PM

To begin with:

If you are, like me, a street walker and in no mood to support or denounce the act of civil disobedience organized for and by what the German band Kraftwerk once described as the ultimate man/machine (the cyclist), there is for you tonight the terrific distraction of Mammy Vice (sorry, I mean Miami Vice). From Brad Steinbacher’s review:

[A] decidedly non-winking update of the ’80s television series—is in many ways the ultimate Michael Mann film. All the touchstones are there, from the shiny cars to the industrial locales to the heavy use of blues and grays. Oceans are on hand for lingering gazes; women are on hand for conflicted grazing—swap out the title card and this could easily be a description of Heat. But while that film has become a certifiable classic worthy of repeat viewings (the block-by-block shootout alone begs revisiting at least once a year)…

To end with:

A) Woody Allen has made yet another film. It’s called Scoop. It stars Scarlett Johansson. This passage is from USA Today’s review of Scoop:

“She was a femme fatale in last year’s serious whodunit Match Point, and in this comedic thriller she plays a university student on vacation in London. Johansson is not Allen’s new Diane Keaton. She’s closer to Mariel Hemingway — though even Allen couldn’t attempt to pull off a romance between his septuagenarian self and a girl in college.”
Woody is the man.

B) The Hindu has a conversation with Paul Theroux about his new book The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia. Here is the heart of that conversation:

Our talk moves on to some of the authors who have affected him. For starters, there is V.S. Naipaul, a famous love-hate relationship that’s recorded in Sir Vidia’s Shadow. “Naipaul is an awful person, a tyrannical uncle..”

C) Lastly, as Annie Wagner pointed out earlier this week, this is what the New Yorker has to say about Wikipedia. And this is what Wikipedia has to say about the personal life of the German philosopher who forced English readers to deal with dasein, Martin Heideggar:

In 1917, Heidegger married Elfriede Petri, in a Protestant wedding. She has been blamed for being a negative influence on him, by virtue of her strong anti-Semitic and Nazi sympathies. Heidegger had several extramarital affairs, including two very important ones with Jewish women who were his students, Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Blochmann, with whom he remained in contact for the rest of his life (except during World War II). Only with the recent publication of the letters between Martin and Elfriede Heidegger in 2005 did it become known that the Heidegger marriage was an “open” one, in that Elfriede likewise had affairs, including one with the family doctor who fathered her first son, Hermann Heidegger.
Doctors will fuck any body.

Speaking of sex, while some of you were, to quote Shalamar, “dancing in the sheets” last night, I had a dream about being a civil engineer. I was building big bridges, improving the infrastructure, making sure that civilization was in excellent working order. Then I awoke. Through the open window by my purple bed, a cool stench from a ruptured sewer breezed into my room. To quote Weezer, “But when we wake/It’s all been erased/And so it seems/Only in dreams. only in dreams.”


CommentsRSS icon

The Great Railway Bazaar is not a new book. It was written in 1973.


Hope this is as much interest as the dated Theroux book, but there is a new article called "Gay Paree..." on my blog, and I think you might get something out of checking it:

If you are one of the millions

of back, neck and shoulder pain or arthritis sufferers, you could get some valuable help
(and for free) from Back Be Better---the blog
about finding relief from back and other pain.

Please take a look at

http://backbebetter.blogspot.com

Comments Closed

In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 45 days old).