Abraham “looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace” (Genesis 19:28). Matteo Garrone’s horrifying film Gomorra depicts a sun-bleached Campania engulfed in a conflagration of mafia violence where one could easily mistake the smog of illicit industry for the brimstone of divine retribution. The Neapolitan mob is known as the Camorra, phonetically inviting the allusion to the Biblical exemplar of collective evil, and the film succeeds in making it an apt comparison.
Egypt is the place to be right now. Personally, I don’t want to be there, but it is certainly the best place to be. I am jealous of those who are there right now. Before I explain why, a little … Read More
“Civilizations come and go, people die, kings conquer, and continents shift, but the cockroach is there, in the shadows, making its mark on all of them. That’s a dream in itself.”
The day after President Nixon’s announcement of an imminent US invasion of Cambodia, a group of Kent State University history graduate students—calling themselves World Historians Opposed to Racism and Exploitation (WHORE)—convened an anti-war rally on the Commons…
In high school I once wore my Pitbulls for Obama t-shirt (turned muscle tank) — which depicts three pitbulls, a speech bubble attached to one of them, saying “we don’t need no stinking lipstick”…
So, to briefly memorialize the show for now: it’s a play about a play–a construction called, thanks again to ‘kipedia, a “mise en abyme”–about Edgar Alan Poe.
One of my favorite pieces of writing that I’ve ever read is “Pafko at the Wall,” a novella by Don DeLillo that also serves as the opening to his massive novel _Underworld_. The story is about “The Shot Heard ‘round … Read More
You might have heard that a half-black man named Barack Obama is running for President. This sounds ridiculous, but the last few weeks have revealed that some have not.
Kickin’ around the Nass office late one night, we thought we saw the face of the Virgin Mary on a sofa cushion, but up close it looked more like David Patterson, so we just decided to flip it. Then somebody suggested we do a PrinceWatch, as it had after all been a while since the last edition.
In the Fall of 1930, Soviet architect Andrei Konstantinovich Burov was part of a team assembled by Moscow to visit Detroit’s state-of-the-art factories and to establish links with America’s leading industrialists…
