Media Overload

-
It is so hard for me to crack a book these days, with the vortex pull of the internet and the ease of online articles and blogs the kind of writing it's so easy to just drop in on. But something about that process, the jumping around cyberspace also does something to your attention span, making it harder when faced with a more substantive read, to do the heavy lifting required. I feel addled and teenaged and I can't imagine what it's like for my 5-year-old to grow up with this distracted, free-ranging mentality.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Dark Coming-of-Age Story for Girls

-
Image
Sidney Flanigan in Never Rarely Sometimes Always /Image courtesy of Focus Features Tales of innocence lost and knowledge gained, the male bildungsroman in film runs the tonal gamut from American Graffiti t o Stand By Me to Boyhood . It's an adventure story coupled with a rite of passage that signals a shift from childhood to manhood. Director Eliza Hittman's devastating Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a coming-of-age with a difference, an "adventure" defined by a quest, myriad obstacles and a fresh, painful reckoning with the world's injustices, for both protagonist and audience. The quest in this case is 17-year-old Autumn's (Sidney Flanigan) herculean effort to obtain an abortion following sex, the film insinuates, that may not have been her choice. The film's title comes from an interview in a New York City Planned Parenthood office in which Autumn is asked to, essentially, recount her sex life on a rating scale from good to horrific a
Read more

Subtext

-
Image
Felicia Feaster was born in Jimmy Stewart's hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania.  She received her B.A. in film studies from the University of Florida and her M.A. in film studies from Emory University.  Her master's thesis on exploitation film became a book, Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film co-authored with fellow lowbrow connoisseur, husband and filmmaker Bret Wood ( Hell's Highway , Psychopathia Sexualis ) and a Kino Lorber DVD series .  A former staff art and film critic for Atlanta’s alternative newsweekly Creative Loafing, Felicia is currently a managing editor at HGTV.com and TravelChannel.com and the art critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution .  Her writing has appeared in Elle , The Economist , New York Press , Atlanta magazine, Sculpture , Art in America , Travel + Leisure , Artnews , Playboy online and Art Papers .  She has curated exhibitions for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and TEW Galleries in Atlanta. She has received mul
Read more

Surf's Up

-
Image
(Photo courtesy: Magnolia Pictures) Almost everyone must at some point harbors a secret desire to drop off the grid: to leave behind the racket of health insurance and home payments and just, be , in that hackneyed Sixties sense. Surfwise , the documentary about Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz, a Stanford-educated M.D. who dropped out of the rat race to raise his nine kids in a 24-foot camper, is both a cautionary tale and advertisement for living free. I have a deep affection for lovable iconoclasts and for surfing movies, so teamed up, this film is pure narcotic.
Read more