Criticism-in-finity!
Posted in Reviews on Mar 24th, 2011
Spring has arrived. While others admire the anxious hummingbirds and slutty camellias, I pause to mourn the passing of winter and the disappearance of men in knit caps. In the cold, I like to gaze at them as they pass by in ribbed skullcaps and slouchy tams. These hats frame their faces—their round cheeks and [...]
Posted in Reviews on Mar 21st, 2011
It’s one of our oldest American pastimes. Before reality television. Before the local color school. Think Mary Rowlandson, 1682. The birth of the captivity narrative. Who are they? Simply: not us. The boundary can lie along a fault of ethnicity or wealth. Geography, perhaps. Profession. Sexual orientation. But who, then, amongst this panoply of subcultures, [...]
Posted in Reviews on Mar 16th, 2011
On the morning of Friday, March 11th, Internet humor site The Daily What posted a link to “Friday,” a music video by Rebecca Black, a thirteen-year-old singer-songwriter from California. The song is a train wreck: nasal, flat, and auto-tuned vocals spewing absolute nonsense over a tinny backbeat of pre-canned drums and synthesizers. At one point [...]
Posted in Reviews on Mar 10th, 2011
The lights are bright like a dentist’s headlamp and the cash registers, even from dead-bolted doors sixty yards off, flicker blue dots. Lost in his baseball cap, a lanky teen swabs the floor in clipped circles. The morbidly obese manager, whose entire black shirt is splattered with oil and condiments, stands next to the boy [...]
Posted in Reviews on Mar 7th, 2011
Congratulations grandma, you’re eighty, and you still bus into the city and take the subway. You wait in line, you walk (but never jog, never ever jog). It’s time. Time for you to look as mean as a bulldog and take advantage of senility. You like to guess where the bus door is going to [...]
Posted in Reviews on Mar 2nd, 2011
Softness & warmth. These are the qualities with which we often associate scarves, & by such standards we often rate them. The quality of the knit, the smoothness of the silk or coziness of the yarn, the delicacy of its fleece—wrapped tightly or piled loose around our necks, we can understand why they were known [...]