Music
REM’s Comeback
"…for a supposed comeback attempt, R.E.M. doesn't seem desperate to be loved here. Much of Accelerate actually sounds fired-up and angry: ‘Living Well Is the Best Revenge’ is an aggressive opening salvo, the oblique narrative of ‘Mr. Richards’ finds Stipe at his most effectively political, and the gritty, double-speed ‘Horse to Water’ is the album's most self-critical song… If it isn't able to recapture the post-punk energy of Reckoning, the political fury of Life's Rich Pageant, or the epic scope of Automatic for the People, the album, at the very least, finds the band playing to its strengths rather than attempting to explore an increasingly thin artistic mythology. That alone justifies Accelerate's positive buzz, even if the album doesn't quite support the magnitude of it.” READ MORE >
Books
Holy Man: What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?
“’The more he gave himself to the world,’ Iyer writes, the more Tibetans have come to feel ‘like natural children bewildered by the fact that their father has adopted three others.’ …Avidly embracing the liberating ideas of the secular metropolis, the Dalai Lama resembles the two emblematic types who have shaped the modern age, for better and for worse—the provincial fleeing ossified custom and the refugee fleeing totalitarianism. Even so, his critics may have a point: the Dalai Lama’s citizenship in the global cosmopolis seems to come at a cost to his dispossessed people… It is hard to see the Dalai Lama bringing about mutual understanding in the world at large when he has failed to bring it about between China and Tibet.” READ MORE >
Books
Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium
“About the Lower East Side today,’ Mr. Price said, ‘This place is like Byzantium. It’s tomorrow, yesterday — anyplace but today.’ ... ‘Lush Life’ took so long to finish, he said, in part because he spent so much time researching it — talking to people, riding around with the neighborhood police and sometimes just walking around. ‘I always like to hang out,’ he said, ‘because, one, it’s a way of avoiding really writing; and, two, sometimes God is a crackerjack novelist and you can plagiarize the hell out of him.’ He particularly liked hanging out with cops, he said, ‘because I’m so not a cop myself. Being with them gets me out of my own self-consciousness.’” READ MORE >
Movies
Rated G for Glorious
“…In the Jungle of Nool something foreign lands on a piece of clover. It's not a spaceship but an entire alien world: the nearly infinitesimal planet of Who-ville. Horton the elephant, his large ears giving him the most acute hearing, detects cries from the clover speck. He can't see the little Whos, but he deduces, believes, knows that sentient creatures are in there; and his caring instinct tells him that they must be protected. He builds a rapport with the tiny planet's resident scientist, Dr. Hoovey, who is having just as much trouble convincing his villagers that there's a giant outside force, unseen but benevolent, that will determine their future." READ MORE >
Books
Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana
“Far from pushing boundaries, or the church's buttons, Rice's portrayal of Jesus as the son of God and the savior of humankind is theologically sound. At the same time, he's also very human, with needs and cares readers can relate to. ‘It's an attempt to get close to him and what he experienced, to make it historically exciting and historically correct,’ she said. Writing the books ‘has made me conscious of what (Jesus) suffered in the way of derision and dismissal … Just like today -- people go around making jokes about him. But he goes right on winning souls no matter what anybody does. We've come 2,000 years, and you can still sit at his feet and hear him speak and feel his hand, maybe, touch your shoulder. He survives it all.’" READ MORE >
Movies
Board Game: Gus Van Sant’s latest experiment works
“The book is linear and psychological and even invokes Dostoyevsky—Notes From the Underground… and, by implication, Crime and Punishment. Van Sant dumps Dostoyevsky and ruptures the story line; his narrator, Alex, apologizes for screwing up the order of events… Alienation, guilt—it’s all free-floating, as if Camus had reworked Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.”’ READ MORE >
Books
The Last Triumph of Fatima
The centrality of Fatima to the second, ‘suffering servant’ stage of John Paul II's papacy, and his involvement with the two men who would become the Vatican's numbers one and two after his death, may help explain why Lucia's cause has been fast-tracked for beatification... In the book, Bertone seems relieved that all the Virgin's prophecies were now safely in the past tense, and could no longer be seen as portending the world's end: ‘It's all quite different from the massive carnage certain fevered brains like to imagine taking place,’ he writes… READ MORE >
Books
The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors
…Dan Ariely’s new book, ‘Predictably Irrational,’ an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says… So what can be done? One answer, he says, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: ‘In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.’” READ MORE >
Movies
Penn’s ‘Into the Wild’ Is Beautiful, Stirring, Complex
"…too-muchness is the essence of the story—a hero's gallant, possibly mad and inevitably doomed attempt to channel too much experience and too many ideas through one young life that can't possibly hold it all… Moviegoers will argue the question of whether the young man's quest succeeds or fails: Is he a pilgrim who finds the transcendence he sought, or a wounded bird flying blind on lofty ambitions, or both? There's no arguing, however, that ‘Into the Wild’ is a new experience, even though some of its countercultural themes and tropes may seem familiar. It's a mainstream movie of ideas that lives in a world of fateful action.” READ MORE >
Books
After the Apocalypse
“As they travel the father feeds his son a story, the nearest that he can come to a creed or a reason to keep on going: that he and his son are ‘carrying the fire.’ …the boy seems to intuit a promise: that life will not always be thus; that it will improve, that beauty and purpose, sunlight and green plenty will return; in short that everything is going to be ‘okay,’ a word which both characters endlessly repeat to each other, touching it compulsively like a sore place or a missing tooth. They are carrying the fire through a world destroyed by fire, and therefore—a leap of logic or faith that by the time the novel opens has become almost insurmountable for both of them—the boy must struggle on, so that he can be present at, or somehow contribute to, the eventual rebirth of the world.” READ MORE >
Movies
California Burning
“A strange and enthralling evocation of frontier capitalism and manifest destiny set at the dawn of the 20th century… There's hardly a dull moment. Digs collapse, gushers burst into flame, God metes out punishment and so does man. Revelations overturn the narrative: The last 20 minutes are as shocking in their way as the plague that rains from the sky in Magnolia's finale. By the time the closing words "There Will Be Blood" appear (with a burst of Brahms) inscribed in heavy gothic letters on the screen, Anderson's movie has come to seem an Old Testament story of cosmic comeuppance and filicidal madness—American history glimpsed through the smoke and fire that the lightning left behind.” READ MORE >
Books
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
“Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off ‘American Idol’ and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism… Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a ‘cultural conservationist.’” READ MORE >
