August 2007 | Issue 57
Editorial
Articles
By Justin Vicari
"It flashes before our eyes, and we are not even sure what we have witnessed."
By David C. Ryan
What's Greek history without distortions, inaccuracies, and falsehoods?
By D. J. M. Saunders
Pause. N-o-o-o-o-t!
By Richard Armstrong
Will the twain ever meet?
By Andrew Culbertson
"His characters have tended to be more bewildered by life and disgusted by a world that won't cooperate."
By Guy Crucianelli
"Like the implicit struggle between Salome and Herod, it becomes unclear as to who serves whom."
By Matt Brennan
"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?"
By Nicholas de Villiers
Ecce homo
By Karin Luisa Badt
"People can die without love."
By Lesley Chow
"Lazarus doesn't pathologize the locked-in gaze, he lets us feel it."
By Alan Vanneman
Up shit creek without a Pichon Longueville '47
Movies
By Alan Vanneman
Harry the Fifth comes in third
By Ian Johnston
"There's no overt sexuality to Rawang's care for Hsiao Kang. It's a tender act of love, a selfless giving of himself to another. "
By Ian Johnston
"The grafting on of the film's film noir plot has a reductionist minimalism to it, as if Kaurismaki were sketching an archetype . . .
By Alan Vanneman
Can a film with George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt be all bad? Yes.
By Alan Vanneman
Eat first, talk later? If only!
Stars
By Dan Callahan
"You'd never get tired of having her around, because she'd always be someone else for you."
Directors
By Karin Luisa Badt
"What these Americans have could happen to us. And this is frightening."
By Karin Luisa Badt
"I hate the idea that film is actually telling a story!"
By Damon Smith
On Black Book and his recent Hollywood defection
By Tom Sutpen
Autobiography sometimes trumps art in these uneven works
Columns
Festivals
By Megan Ratner
From neighborhood festival to NYC player
By Gary Morris
"We couldn't figure out how to divide the cat . . ."
Recent Posts

Bresson gets interrogated by cruel French interviewers, or does he?The YouTube copyright police removed John Cromwell's 1932 feature The Silver Cord from our "petit theatre," but we're back with Robert Bresson, in a fascinating interview for French television in which the interrogators seem as much like Bresson "models" as Mouchette, Fontaine, or that "Francis the Talking Mule" of art cinema, poor Balthasar. Some have called the interviewers "cruel," but is Bresson in fact playing them? Would that surprise us?

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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