November 2011 | Issue 74
From the Editor
Features
J. D. Markel
"You can laugh while Rome is burning, but believe you me, Poppy, it is burning, and if you don't wake up, then you will be burnt to a cinder . . . I mean, look around you. What do you see? Do you see a policy of bringing happiness to people?" – Scott in Happy-Go-Lucky
Happy-Go-Lucky

Gregory Stephens
"He said he might not survive, and ended with the ritual declaration: 'I now walk into the wild.' Civilization had 'poisoned' him, but the best of civilization gave him words to describe both what he was fleeing, and what he intended to embrace."
Articles
"Are we watching a faux-documentary within an entertainment vehicle? One suspects only Banksy knows. And he's too busy painting to tell us."
Exit Through the Gift Shop

Whether neo-noir or horror, underexposed or ignored, several films of 2010 employed devilishly motivated moving camera to disturbing effect.
Movies
Graham Daseler
"For the performer, the movie offers an even more metaphysical quandary: how do you play yourself? 'The thing that drove me nuts,' Andre explained, 'is that I'm playing a character based on me. So then the question is, who am I? And which Andre?'"
Dinner with Andre

"There are truths that can only be revealed on condition of having been discovered."
–  Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies (2003)
Barry Stephenson
"[B]ecause the story is filled with ritual and religion, we were always going into temples. I was particularly obsessed with participating in any religious ceremonies I could get involved with."  – Wes Anderson, on the making of The Darjeeling Limited
William Anselmi and Sheena Wilson
"Nolan is making evident, both through form and narrative, his criticism of the sweeping radicalization of cinematic work that has privileged the technological wonder of the movies over formulations of innovative and complex narratives that deal with human existence."
Mark Chapman
"At no point are Erika's fantasies visualized, and so the spectator's reference points are the same as Erika's — the extremes of hardcore pornography and the austerity of bourgeois Vienna."
Alex Kirschenbaum
"This film is about process, about transitory states, about the journey in between the grimy Chicago pool halls that serve as Vince and Eddie's intellectual and physical training grounds."
Experimental/Avant Garde
Robert Smart
"Moricz's work assaults the viewer with a whiplash barrage of familiar plot lines, trite turning points, and cliché characters spouting simultaneously banal and inflated rhetorical dialogue, all infusing narratives propelled by a poignant and urgent anxiety derived from the tensions of everyday life."
Bob Moricz

Television
Frank Bren
"Ernie's contract is reported to contain a clause forbidding him ever to consult a psychiatrist. The network is afraid if he ever became normal he'd be ruined." – Dorothy Kilgallen
Ernie Kovacs

William Leung
After three decades of searching in vain for another Wonder Woman, it's time to reiterate the importance of Lynda Carter's iconic portrayal and its meaning to popular culture feminism.
Stars
Looking at Charlie

Directors
Mark Cresswell and Zulfia Karimova
"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are."
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Rich Boy"
Bergman's Women

Graham Daseler
"Huston once described his job to John Milius like this: 'You will confer with generals, you will dine at the table with kings, and you will sleep with titled women. All of this you will do while being dead broke. That's what being a director is.' Should we even feign surprise that when it came time to make The Bible he cast himself as the voice of the Almighty?
Festivals
"Eve is like a cat, attracted by textures – stroking a violinist's hands with chiffon and becoming entranced by a piece of fruit. She spends most of her time in ecstatic graceless dancing; even though anger and jealousy are present, they are rendered painless."
Melbourne International Film Festival

"Moretti's aim in We Have a Pope is to unleash as many dissenting voices on the airwaves as possible — to create space within the tightness and enclosure of historical memories."
"The cinema exists to record the moment when souls become visible." –Jean-Michel Frodon
Columns
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Bright Sights

Books
Death Wish by Christopher Sorrentino
Reviewed by Chad Trevitte
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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