Friday, July 24, 2015
"When people ask how I became interested in history, I answer it was through an interest in popular culture and disreputable genres."
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:06PMWednesday, July 1, 2015
The writing in this novel depends on winks and nods. You’re invited to be in on a big joke, assuming it is one.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:21PMWednesday, June 10, 2015
Hollywood Express is closing at the end of July. Movies will be distributed by Cloud. Have you ever tried talking to the Cloud?
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 01:21PMThursday, May 28, 2015
Author Vivian Gornick's discontent is foundational, fertile, unquenchable, except by writing, and quite often funny.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:27PMTuesday, May 19, 2015
My conclusion is that Mad Men is abstract, like some of the art in the series.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:56PMWednesday, May 13, 2015
How you act sanely when your country is brazenly committing genocide? Many of us didn't.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:00PMSaturday, January 31, 2015
At every turn I sense potential in The Americans, always untapped, for a smart sitcom.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:42PMMonday, January 12, 2015
It is unlikely that those who turned automatic fire on the staff of Charlie Hebdon ever read Michel Houellebecq.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 03:08PMSaturday, January 3, 2015
Assaf Gavron's sweeping, smart, often funny new novel spins a satiric update on Exodus.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:19PMThursday, January 1, 2015
"Unlike the talent for war, the ability to make peace has always been rare."
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:15AMMonday, December 8, 2014
How African pygmies came to St. Louis has everything to do with Barnum, with freak shows, with unreconstructed racism.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:59PMThursday, December 4, 2014
On this show, thriving on caricature as it does, the chasm between Amy and Sheldon stops laughter long enough to suggest poignancy.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 12:58PMSunday, November 9, 2014
It took me until I was nearly done with The Betrayers to step back and realize that one reason I found it so absorbing is that alienation plays no part.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 04:00PMMonday, October 20, 2014
Religion occupies pride of place in this volume. As Lawrence Wright says at the outset: "The struggle for peace at Camp David is a testament to the enduring force of religion in modern life"
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:53PMWednesday, September 3, 2014
The trippiness, the nudge regarding unused powers, regarding vision, regarding the potential of our minds, are the best parts of Lucy.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 02:47PMTuesday, August 19, 2014
It's a vampire novel minus actual vampires. Evil bloodsucking editors and agents fill in very well as monsters on the loose.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:17AMSunday, July 27, 2014
There's room to wonder if Vladmir Jabotinsky would have accepted Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu as his legitimate Zionist heirs.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 08:31AMTuesday, June 3, 2014
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's erudition, coupled to her literary skill, makes Plato at the Googleplex inviting and readable without sacrificing complexity.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 05:25PMSunday, May 4, 2014
"Cambridge" is being marketed as a novel, which means the author has included embellishments
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 06:37PMThursday, April 3, 2014
What about today? Has Russia finally hit bottom and recovered? Is the political economy of vodka a thing of the past?
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 02:18PMSaturday, March 29, 2014
Simon Schama just can't stop going on about religion and the extra-special Jewish feel for beauty that has, to his mind, kept Judaism vibrant and intact through the ages.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 03:22PMFriday, March 14, 2014
Everyone is a bit more stupid than they need to be in this movie, both the Germans and the Jews.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:17PMWednesday, February 12, 2014
Significant changes in the world of the art museum can trigger roiling controversy or transpire in problematic quiet.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 02:30PMSunday, January 12, 2014
Powell, the translator, a respected classicist, is noted for promulgating the theory that the Greek alphabet was designed precisely in order to capture epic poetry, provide some approximatio…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:47AMMonday, November 18, 2013
Doris Lessing baffled categories and critics, except for those, like me, who were marked by her and knew her for the bold and extraordinary writer and creature that she was.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 11:33AMTuesday, November 12, 2013
The late Arthur Danto was open to and appreciative of all sorts of possibilities in art, as other visual arts critics were not.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:10PMWednesday, October 30, 2013
The moral urgency and the humane distribution of Adelle Waldman's authorial sympathy are evident everywhere in "The Love Affair of Nathaniel P."
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 06:30PMThursday, October 24, 2013
In the first episode, Henry Louis Gates Jr. takes viewers back to Africa to talk, not as has been done before, with Africans whose forebears were lost to slavery but with descendants of Afri…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 01:04PMSaturday, October 19, 2013
iIf we lift the fog hovering over the War in Vietnam what we find a story nearly unknown in the West: far from devising and launching the Tet Offensive, Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap con…
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 10:54AMSaturday, September 21, 2013
It's hard to grasp how Jonathan Lethem assimilated all this material — historical and fantastic — and gave it new narrative life in Dissident Gardens, except by granting, at the least, …
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 03:26PMThursday, August 22, 2013
The Attack is a movie that tries to get to the core of violence without dissolving into its depiction.
SOURCE: The Arts Fuse at 07:36PM 
