Written, directed, edited, and starring Joanna Arnow, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, is a painfully funny, mildly disturbing deadpan comedy about Ann, a young Jewish woman in New York floating between an unsatisfying office career and intermittently satisfying submissive sexual relationships. Its honesty (and believability) left us dazzled. Arnow, who...
Exploring the fascinating (and disturbing) connection between an obsession with “true crime” television and one chronically ill woman’s serial surgeries and medical emergencies, Marcia Trahan’s bravely honest memoir Mercy compels readers to consider the omnipresent violence — both literal and figurative — visited upon women’s bodies. Not a jolly subject, right? Surprisingly, Trahan’s telling of her...
For more than 15 years, she’s worked behind the Concierge Desk at several of the finest hotels in Los Angeles. Sabrina [her name has been changed at her request] will get you anything (well, almost anything) you want, because that’s her job, and she does it well. Securing dinner reservations at “fully booked” restaurants, hiring...
These fine fellows with their wattles and their medals Their jiggling jowls and joyless eyes Broadcasting breaking news from the feeding trough Where these fine fellows congregate and cogitate These alphamen oozing oleaginous charm Any cute ambitious telegenic girl with a healthy appetite for achievement Could hardly resist How unpleasant and unkind and unthinkable really For...
The playwright Aristophanes wrote a hit comedy called “Lysistrata.” It’s about all the women in Greece going on a sex strike until all the men agree to stop fighting the Peloponnesian wars. Frustrated husbands walk around onstage with painful erections. It’s funny stuff, if unrealistic. Such a sex strike could never really work. All the...
If, like us, you don’t watch much television and, therefore, effectively shield yourself from the indignities of all the marketing/messaging/propaganda used to sell products and “lifestyles,” when you come face-to-face with the fire-breathing beast, your ignorance of Basic Ideas might take your breath away. It did ours. We were forced from our hermetically sealed cave...
Originally released in 2002, Adam Curtis’s “Century of the Self” was a four-part series on the BBC that examined how Sigmund Freud’s theories of human psychology have been employed (and refined) by the rich and powerful to control the dangerous impulses of the masses. Much of this dazzlingly entertaining yarn focuses on Freud’s nephew Edward...
How terribly awfully blatantly and, one might emphasize, preposterously naïve to envision even for a frivolous moment a world, or a set of circumstances, alternating laws and chances, in which wherein and also everything else you can dream, human beings, people decide to make love the reason for living. Slilly thought yes. Even sillier,...
Now that the kind and understanding Mullahs of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei have consented to allow their nation’s second-class citizens to participate, the 2012 Olympic Games are the first ever in which every country’s team includes women. It’s about time. Some of us have a weird thing for chicks in chadors, especially when they’re shooting...
Apologies in advance if this gets all Orwellian right quickly. We try hard not to sound like a nut-job or Coast-to-Coast Radio conspiracy fetishist — is that redundant? — especially when examining the lengths some folks will go to control the lives of others, but this stuff is real, man. Old George – or, Mr....
Domestic Terrorists“Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.” – U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, ordering the release of a…
David Breskin, a renowned record producer, author and artist, wrote a poem every day for six months in 2024, prohibiting himself from revising. Instead, he “timestamped” each work at the moment of completion — and returned to composition the next day. The resulting book, Timestamp: The Daily Practice of Poetry, is a triumph, simultaneously entertaining, provocative,...
