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Weblog From Nowhere-Land

What Is Malick Saying?

Farther down this page and back in time I relate a story told by legendary film producer and Paramount head of production, Robert Evans, about the reaction to an early draft of Robert Towne's CHINATOWN, a script he would ultimately produce to great acclaim, as well as a certain amount of head-scratching. Read More 
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A Vulcan Analysis of the "Blurred Lines" Verdict

Because my own command of logic is hampered by my right-brain bias, and I am frankly stumped by this case, I have summoned from a distant space-time locus perhaps our greatest logician, Mr. Spock, to iron things out. Here is an excerpt from my interrogatory.  Read More 
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Why We Need To Watch the Latest ISIS Video

"Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up — he had judged. 'The horror!'" --Marlow, speaking of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness Read More 
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"Je t'aime, Charlie." "Moi non plus."

"Our Muhammad is really a lot nicer," says Charlie Hebdo's Editor-in-Chief about the cover of the magazine's post-massacre issue, which has now achieved a print run of five-million. And indeed he is. Nicer. He sheds a tear for those killed in his name, and holds a "Je Suis Charlie" sign in the manner of those Instagram shots of people displaying handwritten placards of confession or protest. He is also not proffering his hairy, naked ass to the world or saying, Le Coran, c'est de la merde,  Read More 
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Redemption On The Road

Stephen Knight's LOCKE is a movie about a man trying to hold the world together from behind the wheel of a BMW on the motorway between Cardiff and London, with nothing but a hands-free phone and a tightly-coiled will. Read More 
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Why Dickens Is The One Christmas Tradition We Need To Keep

“There are many things from which I have derived good, but by which I have not profited,” returned Scooge's nephew. “Christmas among them." --Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

My family was only partially successful in keeping Christmas traditions. Tradition is tied to religion and ethnicity, and we had neither, really.  Read More 
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The Face Behind The Veil

Thirty years after I first cracked it, I sat down again to read my yellowed copy of one of the most entrancingly strange books ever written, The White Goddess by the English poet, novelist and essayist, Robert Graves. Read More 
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A Quantum of Consciousness

I've been reading David Peat's biography of the great maverick physicist (and hand-picked Einstein heir) David Bohm, who probably did more than any single person to put words like holistic and connectedness into the vocabulary we now use to describe the fabric of reality.  Read More 
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The Spider's Stratagem

If you haven't yet seen Denis Villeneuve's ENEMY, the year's strangest and most nightmarishly captivating movie, time to Netflix it. Villenueve, French-Canadian director of the Oscar-nominated INCENDIES and the child abduction thriller, PRISONERS, has made the closest thing we have to a David Lynch film in a year without a David Lynch film,  Read More 
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Non-Consensual

Can you describe a non-consensual encounter in 50 words or less?

I removed salon.com as my homepage a year ago, when I began to notice a devolution from cutting edge cultural journalism to "My Teen Pregnancy Nightmare" scandal sheet. But I kept reading Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon's bracingly fresh sexual morés commentator. She's an insightful, sex-positive "equity feminist" who writes from a woman's perspective in a way that makes men want to read Read More 
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