Violence and the Moral Responsibility of the Artist
My movie-watching habits changed some 18 years ago when, having seen and laughed through much of Quentin Tarantino’s comic-violent second movie, Pulp Fiction (1994), I backtracked to his debut film,...
View ArticleViolence Revisited
I’ve been thinking about young men and violence. And now, in the wake of the Pentagon’s announcement earlier this week that women are henceforth approved to engage in front-line combat, young women and...
View ArticleRolling Toward Super Sunday: A Fresh Look At “Rollerball”
I want to assure returning readers that no, this will not be a blog devoted solely to discussions of violence—it just appears to have insinuated itself as the theme of the week. After all, we’ve got...
View ArticleSex and Other Happiness Pursuits: “The Sessions” and Disability Rights
Sex, eating, drinking and sleeping form a kind of Holy Quartet of what psychologists call “needs-based cognitions,” but the first of those is by far the most complicated in human life. For all its...
View ArticleOn a Too-Short Road With Jack Kerouac
There is this one life we are given. This we know. All the rest of it—the heavens, the reincarnations, the other life-as-rehearsal scenarios—let us set those aside for the moment and concentrate on the...
View ArticleAn Ode to Golden Gate Fog
Fog is rich—in mystery, in metaphor, in intrigue. Fog was noir before noir existed at all. We walk out the door and espy the fog and up comes the collar and the shoulders, and we are set to hunker,...
View ArticleBeauty, Harmony, Depravity: Musings on Marina Abramovic and Performance Art
Is it possible for art to cross a line into such monstrous or simply offensive or empty moral terrain that it is no longer deserving of categorization as “art?” A quick look at dictionary.com’s basic...
View ArticleNutrition for the Eyes: A Holiday Photo Gallery
In this “Special Holiday Edition!” of the Traversing blog, I’m going to severely crimp on the words. Instead, I’ll let us all scroll and feast on just a sampling of the vision and verve exemplified by...
View ArticleThat “Hope” Stuff: Inside Llewyn Davis and the Boston Bombing Survivors
Few filmmakers convey the desolation of the physical landscape and its various reflections in the human heart as well as the Coen brothers. Their current film, Inside Llewyn Davis, takes this...
View ArticleThe Human Connection: “Her” and “Twenty Feet From Stardom”
A slew of almost electrically talented backup singers grappling with never quite breaking the stardom barrier and a lonely man with his new girlfriend-the-operating system filled up a dreary weather...
View ArticleNoah: The Movie, the Fable, and the Issue of Belief
I’d like it known that I read the book first. Which, as all literarily inclined people know, is the right and proper order of things in a modern media age when Hollywood regularly absconds with your...
View ArticlePerfection or Oppression? Chasing Happiness With Epicurus and “The Giver”
So we heard from Kierkegaard a couple of posts ago, and his prescription for happiness, at least as it existed in his own mind. Kierkegaard largely turned his back on the pleasures and joys of this...
View ArticleIt’s Life, Just Life: Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”
Nothing much happens in Richard Linklater’s finely wrought film, Boyhood. No stabbings or shootings, no kidnaps or car wrecks designed to set the protagonists’ lives on a post-crisis course and get...
View ArticleSecond Annual Holiday Photo Gallery
It’s such a sweet time of year, sugared stuff everywhere in front of us. So in the spirit of the season, today I offer you yet another heap of delectables, but these of the eye candy variety that...
View ArticleSelma and McKinney and the Long Jagged Road to Equality
Experienced the most curious juxtaposition of “movies” the other day. In the morning, a phone camera video of a white police officer with his knee in the back of a prone African-American teenage girl...
View ArticleAmy Winehouse’s Cry From the Depths of Creation
At one point in the current documentary (Amy) of the gifted and tortured singer Amy Winehouse, she was so deeply submerged in her partly guttural/feral, partly ravishing/seductive treatment of a song,...
View ArticleFive Photos Challenging Our Notions of a Benevolent God
“Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will. Even all the hairs on your head are numbered.” That’s the gospel of Matthew, verses 29-30,...
View ArticleCatholic Priest Sexual Abuse and Its Cover-up: A Review of “Spotlight”
“When you’re a poor kid from a poor family and a priest pays attention to you, it’s a big deal. How do you say no to God?” That’s the trap door that thousands of children—young boys mostly, but plenty...
View ArticleThe “Memorial Flag” Art of Dave Cole
In his 2005 work, “Memorial Flag (Toy Soldiers),” Providence, Rhode Island-based Dave Cole (born 1975) gives expression to just the kind of moral conundrums all great political art points to....
View ArticleThird Annual Holiday Photo Gallery
In my earliest days as a journalist, words were the thing. If meddlesome editors and art directors wanted to attach photos to the small ink marks of the alphabet that I committed to paper, fine, that...
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