August 2006 | Issue 53
Editorial
Articles
By Alan Vanneman
"LOST CHILD WANTED — Last seen with a little man with large flat feet and a small moustache"
By D. J. M. Saunders
Subtitles for the hard-of-believing
By Brian Grady
"Lord, my Lord! How true it is that whoever works for you is paid in troubles." — St. Teresa of Avila
By Gordon Thomas
"If the demons leave, maybe the angels will too"
By A. Jay Adler
"Whether alone or with others, you live with yourself."
By Lesley Chow
"In films these days, people are hardly ever 'taken' by others — they don't strike up sudden affinities, or become voluptuously intrigued by enemies."
By Andrew Hedden
Deleuze, Marcuse, Bahktin, Dodger, Juice, Valerie Vomit . . .
By Frank Episale
"Why is Fassbinder allowed this aesthetic duplicity in the melodramas but not in Querelle?"
By Ian Johnston
Antonioni's early masterpiece looks better than ever
Movies
By Jayson Harsin
"The film is a kind of subtle argumentation by analogy, whose success rests on the viewer's desire to identify with Gore."
By Alan Vanneman
So middle of the road you can't see the fucking curb
By Alan Vanneman
Do not be alarmed, monsieur. We come from France. We are here to eat your sausages.
By Jake Horsley
Welcome to the "nihilistic message movie"
By Alan Vanneman
Is it a sin to see this film?
By Alan Vanneman
Enough engorged vagina jokes to feed a family of four for an entire year!
By Alan Vanneman
Jürgen Flimm and Brian Large supply a stage production that lives on DVD
By Page Laws
"Singing is the only thing that puts me right."
By Dan Callahan
In which Altman doesn't go gentle into that good night
By Justin Vicari
"Fassbinder's probing camera shows us what the doctors fail to see . . ."
By Victoria Large
Not the usual suspects
By Victoria Large
"Shot in earthbound Eastman color, It's Always Fair Weather doesn't look or feel like the Technicolor froth that preceded it."
Stars
By Lesley Chow
"Speaking of impurity: what was Rita Hayworth's image supposed to be in the '40s?"
Directors
By Michael Betancourt
pa·limp·sest: n., Writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased; something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface (Webster's)
By Scott Thill
"I didn't want to live under the shadow of other films. I want to exist on my own."
Columns
By Gary Morris
"Turn towards me. I'll make do with your heart beating next to mine."
Festivals
By Bo-Myung Seo
A quartet of recent Korean films shows a reassuringly robust national cinema
Recent Posts

The Yes MenAn excerpt with the wildly gymnastic "big-mouth" comic Joe E. Brown, from the film whose name inspired this magazine.

Watch on Youtube »

Gordon Thomas, and other BL staff, check out the eye- popping pleasures of Blu-Ray.

» Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair)
» The General (Keaton)
» Sunrise (Murnau)
» 8-1/2 (Fellini)
» Playtime (Tati)
» Winstanley (Brownlow & Mollo)
» Permissive (Shonteff)
» Lola Montes (Ophuls)
» My Childhood, My Ain Folk ... (Bill Douglas)
» In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima)
» Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney)
» Repulsion (Polanski)
» Institute Benjamenta (Brothers Quay)
» Everlasting Moments (Troell)

BL Associate Editor Alan Vanneman and others watch (and review) television shows so you don't have to. Click if you dare.

» 30 Rock
» Batman: The Animated Series
» Broadway Theatre Archive
» Charlie’s Angels
» Cowboy Bebop
» Death of a Salesman
» Dollhouse
» Freaks and Geeks
» Have Gun Will Travel
» Mad Men
» Magnum P.I.
» Monk
» Pamela Anderson Roast
» Renegade
» Sex and the City

I'm sick of movies, Mr. Webmaster. Take me away!

» Archive.org
Gazillions of free books, audio, and video. Grab 'em before the copyright police come knocking!

» Glenn Greenwald
The indomitable civil liberties champion takes exception to American exceptionalism. You will too when you read his blistering analyses.

» Project Gutenberg
See Archive.org.

» Creative Commons
"All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially."

» The Ivy Compton-Burnett home page
A Bright Lights side project created by George Brown devoted to the greatest novelist of the 20th century. There, we said it.

» Raw Vision
The leading online site (and print publication) devoted to those zany untrained artists who channel personality quirks, neuroses, idées fixes, and downright craziness into Art.

» Siklink.com
An endlessly fascinating clearinghouse for "the greatest hand-picked collection of bizarre, strange and unusual websites on the internet today." Highlights include the enchanting "Prison Bitch Name Generator" and "Life Gem" – how to "turn your deceased loved one into a diamond."

» Clark Ashton Smith
The premier fantasy poet and short-story writer (and sculptor and artist) gets a detailed blog that's a model for intelligent fan-ism. Watch out for falling curmudgeons in the forum.

» Classic Arcade Games
Miss Asteroids? Centipede? Frogger? Miss that you missed them? Here's your chance to enjoy the state of the art circa 1980s.

» Jack Vance
Wikipedia's gateway to our favorite writer in and of science fiction and fantasy. A national treasure.

» Electronic Frontier Foundation
"EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations." Go EFF!

» The Canonical List of Weird Band Names: The Peculiar and the Profane
Another Bright Lights side project from the inimitable George Brown. You probably know the Meat Puppets but how about Lyin' Bitch and the Restraining Orders?

» James Purdy
A good introduction to a criminally neglected postwar literary master. Be 21 or be gone for his gorgeous, harrowing works, kids.

» The Radical Ant Farm
This page answers that nagging question: "What's up with the Russian criminal tattoos?" The rest of the site offers further fun.

» Spectro-Pop
Monumental site devoted to '60s pop music – you know, that stuff playing in the background during the orgy.

» The Left Business Observer
Doug Henwood's long-running economics newsletter, called "invaluable" by Noam Chomsky. Need we say more?

» Jane Bowles
Go to Wikipedia and improve this "stub" on the writer Tennessee Williams looked up to and James Purdy called "the eagle-woman of American letters."

» WFMU
The best online radio station for our money. A deep archive and no-music-turned-away policy will keep you rollin' and tumblin' till the apocalypse.

» Henry Green
Must we create a detailed tribute page to this extraordinary British novelist championed by Auden, Updike, and Terry Southern? Or will you do it? Start with Concluding (1948).

» Women of Surrealism
They weren't all "muses" and maids – these women equaled or surpassed their more celebrated male counterparts in vision and technique.

» Ronald Firbank
He called the president of Haiti "a perfect dear" and was known to eat a single pea at dinner. Oh, and he ranks with Joyce and Woolf (see Edmund Wilson) as a groundbreaking literary modernist.

» Essential Vermeer
Everything you need to know about the Dutch master of light and mysterious figures.

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