TV
“Lost,” that endless engrossing philosophical mish-mash
Like cramming fistfuls of metaphysical crayons back into their tiny box, the Island on "Lost" can barely contain all the colorful epistemologies in its midst. It is a big stew of Philosophy 101's greatest hits... It's like the Monty Python sketch, "International Philosophy," in which Greek and German philosophers battle it out on the soccer field (Socrates's winning goal is contested by Hegel as not being an "a priori reality"). Back on "Lost" Philosophy Island, the implications are just as absurd: After all, if everything is imbued with meaning, then how meaningful is any one thing? READ MORE >
Books
The Dawkins Confusion
“The God Delusion is full of bluster and bombast, but it really doesn’t give even the slightest reason for thinking belief in God mistaken, let alone a ‘delusion.’ Dawkins seems to have chosen God as his sworn enemy. (Let’s hope for Dawkins’ sake God doesn’t return the compliment.)… You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are … READ MORE >
Movies
A Chronicler of Alienated Europeans in a Flimsy New World
“Mr. Antonioni’s fashionableness shouldn’t distract us from his accomplishment. He was a visionary whose portrayal of the failure of Eros in a hypereroticized climate addressed the modern world and its discontents in a new, intensely poetic cinematic language. Here was depicted for the first time on screen a world in which attention deficit … READ MORE >
Music
Wilco frontman takes a more direct lyrical approach on striking new album
“...alienation seemed to be the point on Wilco’s overly arch art-rock projects Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, but on Sky Blue Sky Tweedy reaches out from his solitude in hopes of meeting his listeners—both the woman in the song and the strangers buying his CDs—face-to-face… The album’s title track contrasts our ‘rotten … READ MORE >
Movies
Another ‘Pro-Life” Movie?
"...after the movie ended I wondered what all the fuss was about... I wonder how much of the adulation of reviewers (and the judges at Cannes) stemmed from what they may have perceived as the 'message' of the movie: i.e., illegal abortions are bad, so legal ones must be good. For me, the movie was a litany of the horrors of any abortion, and as much a 'pro-life' movie as 'Juno,' which I had seen the day before. How can observing a lifeless fetus make one anything but pro-life?" 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 >
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
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
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
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 >
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 >
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 >
