Jackson Arn
By Jackson Arn
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Culture ‘Nomadland’ and ‘Borat 2’ are the same movie — but only one deserves the Oscar
Good and bad seem to be out of fashion; these days, it’s all about better and worse. The new president is praised for being better than the Antichrist. Wage slavery is praised for existing at all, because any job is better than no job, and $15 an hour is better than $7.25. In a bizarre…
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Culture No, Mike Nichols wasn’t a great director, but he did touch greatness once
I didn’t think it was possible for an EGOT winner to be an underdog. Mike Nichols had a Grammy when he was 31, a Tony when he was 33, and an Oscar when he was 36. The Emmy didn’t come until he was 70, but to make up for lost time he snatched up two…
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Culture An ode to Ellis Island, whose dingy reality contradicted its majestic dreams
Reading Georges Perec’s prose poem“Ellis Island” (reissued this month in a slim, Statue-of-Liberty green edition courtesy of New Directions), I felt inspired to coin a word. A wee bit precious of me, I’ll admit — but then, as I may have mentioned already, I was reading a book by Georges Perec. This is the writer…
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Culture How a visionary movie director predicted the dire state of culture in 2020
If “culture” means new books, new exhibitions, new music and cinema and so on, 2020 was a good year for culture. Defined almost any other way, 2020 was a terrible year for culture — as it was for pretty much everything else. As I think about 2020, what I immediately remember about the last 346…
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Culture Bellow and Nabokov are gone; their delightfully smug offspring lives on
It’s a brave writer who declares war on cliché. Eventually you’ll lose, probably by friendly fire, and even if you manage to ignore the bullets in your ass, someone else will be glad to poke at them. Most writers, knowing this full-well, try to avoid clichés without fighting them outright. Orwell may have scolded his…
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Culture Sol LeWitt: The conceptual artist who made an app of himself
The history of conceptual art runs parallel to the history of big tech. Their peaks and valleys are the same — all you have to do is change the names and some (though not too many) of the buzzwords. Both started out as young, peripheral and idealistic as the counterculture that inspired them. Over the…
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Culture Now 90, Frederick Wiseman is as vital and relevant as ever
If there were a Nobel Prize for documentary filmmaking, Frederick Wiseman would have won a long time ago. Not just because he’s talented (no guarantee of Stockholm gold), but because his work seems to fit so well with the guilty dynamite mogul’s pet ideals: “wide-hearted humanity,” “benefit to mankind,” and so forth. The first time…
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Culture Weird, shapeless, claustrophobic, disjointed, solipsistic — the newest film from guess who?
Many years before he became the most famous niche, surrealist, seriocomic writer-director in Hollywood, Charlie Kaufman got himself stuck in a tight space. A closet, perhaps, or a hole he was too little to crawl out of. Wherever it was, he was trapped there for a long time, or at least long enough to spark…
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