If you’re like me, you didn’t have high expectations for the first annual Iron Tigers Showdown at High Noon, the chef’s competition and inaugural Frist Fest 2008 event based on the Iron Chef television franchise
If you ask me who my favorite writer is, I’ll probably say Albert Camus, because I love his writing and his ideas and also because his name is recognizable and thus me liking him helps construct a certain image of me. But I am less moved by Camus and the Nobel-prize-crowned glory of his rhetoric than by one more obscure author, whose ideas boil down to little more than a grammar of unhappiness: my favorite novelist, Romain Gary.
Two dark autumns ago, the Arcade Fire made me believe, all over again, in the all-encompassing power of rock and roll. Those were depressingly political times, and the un-political nature of the record offered me an escape. “Funeral” was a triumphant album about loss and renewal, about picking up the pieces in a cold, wintry world; it made me feel that I wasn’t the only one who was strung out and sad and suddenly and pathetically sober.
Here’s to the rubble: starlight starts to grow quietly. The world comes to chaos so quietly. Gravity promised to give up for a minute if we told it the things we know, quietly, so we let foggy breath … Read More
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” -Walter Benjamin Nobody can accuse Jack Bauer of not having done enough for his country. He has killed more people than polio and saved more lives than Jonas Salk. … Read More
