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,...
Adapted by writer-director Mike Flanagan from a Stephen King story, “The Life of Chuck” is one of those rare movies about which the less said the better. Absent prior knowledge of the work’s central question, the uninitiated viewer will discover a profoundly human film of stupendous emotional power. Once you catch your breath and dry...
The poet Jennifer Battisti was a Las Vegas latchkey kid, with casino employee parents. Off Boulder Highway, her extraordinary memoir, some of it fictionalized, much of it beautifully poetic, all of it alarmingly real, makes the performative Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas seem like a sanitized Disney fantasy. Sloppy sex, meth addiction, blackout drunkenness...
The latest poetry collection from prolific author Heather Tosteson, Source Notes: Seventh Decade, is one of those treasured books one finishes and begins to read again. At turns searching and assured, troubled and contented, the poems here range from the deeply personal — including terrible trauma and recovery — to the universally felt. Ostensibly a meditation...
Does righteousness have a sound? Can good intentions be heard in the language of music? Saxophonist/composer Dan Blake’s new recording, Da Fe, attempts an aural answer to those questions, and the results are convincing. A Buddhist, social justice warrior, and former member of the Esperanza Spalding band, Blake’s values are deeply humanist and compassionate; on the...
“Our Highway,” the new multi-media project from the jazz quintet (trio + two reedmen) Cowboys & Frenchmen is a monument to the boundless power of creativity. Rather than merely record an album of their brilliant modern music, the group has made a film — a purposefully trippy film, befitting the notion of travel and motion...
The righteous social justice publisher, Wising Up Press, from Decatur, Georgia, has released their latest anthology, this one simply called Goodness. Several dozen writers grapple with the concept, sharing poems, short stories, essays, and many affecting memoirs, all manifesting a sense, a feeling, of something we all recognize and yearn for but often cannot define....
If you have the stomach for in-depth reporting on corruption in Los Angeles — at City Hall, on the City Council, the police force, everywhere there’s money and power — the citizen journalist Michael Kohlhaas is a necessary read. Just like old-fashioned investigative reporters used to do before being co-opted by papers uninterested in offending...
The cinematic thriller “Last Moment of Clarity,” written and directed by James and Colin Krisel in their major film debut, is a melange of Hitchcockian plot devices — “Vertigo,” particularly — assembled with assured artfulness and narrative control. We’re given what seems like a set of facts — a hapless fellow (Zach Avery, nicely understated)...
Alice Wu’s autobiographical romantic comedy “The Half of It” is worth watching for many reasons, including its original and modern take on the Cyrano de Bergerac theme of love letters written by a surrogate. Perhaps the movie’s biggest revelation is the performance of Leah Lewis, a singer-songwriter whose utter naturalness on screen suggests she’ll soon...
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,...
