Warsaw Dispatch: Holster Your Weapon
Raise your hand if you’ve ever said, “Holster your weapon,” and meant it because someone was aiming a loaded handgun at you, cocked and ready to fire?
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Arts & Culture
The Cost of The Floss
* Airea D. Matthews *
I didn’t want to be judged or ‘poored’, and I knew I was vulnerable to both. So, I vowed to do whatever was necessary to resist the implication and belong, even if it meant being aggressively fake, asking for things I knew my mother couldn’t afford or flat-out lying to my friends.
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The Middle East through Graphic Novels
* Kaveh Bassiri *
I was surprised by the number and quality of the different works, as well as how often these books could be used as teaching tools. The Middle East, with its mythic and socio-political significance, has become a great source of inspiration for many important graphic novelists. The Middle East, with its mythic and socio-political significance, has become a great source of inspiration for many important graphic novelists.
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At Loose Ends in Las Vegas
* Claire Skinner *
One day last week, after dropping my dad off at the airport for a flight back east, I found myself with seven empty hours to spare in Las Vegas. Only May, but already hot–101 degrees. And with the dry wind blowing down from the mountains, it felt even hotter
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No Man’s Land: Robert Altman’s 3 Women
* Mary Camille Beckman *
What value does the culture place on this “girl-woman transition” that it won’t name the people going through it? Robert Altman’s film 3 Women (1977) doesn’t quite answer this question. It does, however, dramatize its premise: the problem of inhabiting an unnamed space. And it does so by launching two of its three title characters—Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek)—into that girl-woman no man’s land. The dramatic tension that arises propels 3 Women forward.
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Out in the Middle of Somewhere
* Kevin Haworth *
I had started driving at six-thirty that morning, heading from my home in Appalachian Ohio to the central part of Iowa. Once I escaped Columbus’s orbit (and its early morning traffic), the roads became so straight I steered with a single finger on the wheel. With cruise control and well-balanced tires, driving through the middle states is an act requiring little intervention. Miles passed under the car like loose thoughts. Every time I blinked, another half-hour had gone by.
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Antena, Language Justice, and Poetry
* Paula Mendoza *
‘Language Justice’ is a term I was wholly unfamiliar with before this encounter. Hearing those two words together, and thinking of what it had to do with this magic book bike, sent a charge through my brain.
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First Films: P.T. Anderson’s “Hard Eight”
* Eric McDowell *
In fact it makes more sense I think to speak of P.T. Anderson’s worlds, in the plural—a variety not only of specific places and times but also of narrative, formal, and stylistic choices and strategies.
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Warsaw Dispatch: On Daffodils
To commemorate the 71st anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto Uprising on April 19th, the daffodil was invoked to transform the yellow badge Jews were required to wear during the Nazi occupation into a symbol to “ express your respect and memory of the heroes from the Warsaw Ghetto.”
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When the Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary
* Kaveh Bassiri *
“The most disgusting film I ever made.”
Rainer Werner Fassbinder on Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?
When I was an undergrad at Santa Clara University, I took buses to San Francisco to see foreign movies. I remember rushing into a double-bill of Rainer Werner Fassbinder films. During the first movie, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970), I had to go to bathroom. I thought nothing important is going to happen, so I went.
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