What is it about storytellers’ imagination that it is inspired by the dystopian rather than the utopian? Dystopian novels are intriguing, for sure, and they reconfigure our social, political, and economic failings in a contextualized environment. They are literary caveats, Cassandra-like parables about what our world could become if we give in to our fears […]
While Hollywood languishes inside of digitized cliché and regressive idolatry of the almighty dollar, the collective work of internationally-based documentary film makers only seems to improve year after year. Is it access to better and more easily functional technology or access to better and more compelling stories? What we used to revere as The News, […]
AINU (2009- 2013) photographs by Laura Liverani The Ainu, the native people of Japan, were officially recognized as an ethnicity in 2008, after more than a century of discrimination and oppression which almost completely effaced their language, society and culture. Today several individuals and groups across Japan are involved in Ainu rights, cultural revitalization and […]
En passant par la Lorraine, / Avec mes sabots, En passant par la Lorraine, / Avec mes sabots, Rencontrai trois capitaines, / Avec mes sabots, Dondaine, oh ! oh ! oh ! / Avec mes sabots. Rencontrai trois capitaines, / Avec mes sabots, Rencontrai trois capitaines, / Avec mes sabots, Ils m’ont appelée : Vilaine […]
When I woke up to the news that Lou Reed died yesterday, it hit me hard, like losing a favorite Uncle, the one who skipped town for the big city and never came home again. This is not such a stretch actually– we love our favorite artists so much that they can be like family– […]
Sharing acronyms can be a real shitter, especially when you’re forever relegated to second place. A month after Toronto International Film Festival wraps up its annual media frenzy, Tokyo wheels out its own TIFF – an event that, but for its accreditation by the FIAPF, might as well not exist to the wider world. You’ll […]
And the Mud Ship Sails Away (Hirobumi Watanabe) And the Mud Ship Sails Away has the nonchalant, half-assed feel of one of those Downtown sketches that start out funny and then refuse to end. The opening title – “Inertia” – pretty much sums up this meandering, no-budget hymn to the tedium of life in rural Tochigi, […]
I had to. There are things like that… places like that… food like that, even drinks… well, of course there are food and drinks like that! I had to go and eat a choucroute at “La maison de la choucroute” in Strasbourg, Alsace, France. Since 2006 when I had my first taste of their choucroute […]
Sometimes the facts of the matter just don’t add up. The sum of human knowledge being what it is, the Internet benefiting us near total access of poetry, literature, philosophy, and music, and yet Kim Kardashian is among the most famous Americans on the planet. Triumphant geeks in apotheosis boast of their roles in the […]
Eleanor Friedberger must have a great sense of humor. Like a dry martini, just a touch of vermouth. Watch her music videos, listen to her lyrics, look at how she dances. She has secretly always wanted to be a Second City or a Groucho Marx impersonator. A runaway Vaudeville / carnival sideshow perhaps? Regardless of […]
Listening to Daft Punk’s recent release of the much heralded Random Access Memories—actually letting the hype around its release fade to white—took the whole summer. Parsing the album’s terabytes of information could take much longer. Much like modern life with its 24-hour non-stop barrage of post-post-modernist pastiche of sound and vision bites, there is simply […]
The next step was to be in le Jura because, as said previously, there is some serious sausage made over there. The driving is not particularly nice if one is to take the highway but if one has time and can take small roads one will be delighted with the landscape and could stop somewhere […]
Whenever I am in Lyon (France) I need to go at least once to the Brasserie Georges. I got acquainted with this place twice actually before I could remember enough to become so attracted to it whenever in the vicinity, almost like iron powder to a magnet. Now I have even turned my dad into […]
Going from the deep south of France all the way to Belgium is no joke. Maybe for people living in the USA or in Canada driving 1300km is of no consequence and they would do it to visit Aunt Gudrun over the weekend. Not so in Europe where the same distance can have you cross […]
