The Pinocchio Theory

Country crossovers?

I’ve become obsessed recently with the weird and rarified microgenre of country music adaptatons of rap and alternative rock. So far I only know of two examples: The Gourds’ cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin and Juice, and Johnny Cash’s recent covers of a surprising range of rock, especially–and most recently–of Hurt, originally by Nine Inch Nails….
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Rewriting the Code of Life

Donna Haraway is right. “The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” Consider how scientists have recently reprogrammed bacteria to use a new amino acid. That is to say, they have not only introduced a 21st amino acid into the bacterium’s environment–in addition to the naturally existing twenty–but also reprogrammed the bacteria’s DNA to code for this new amino acid, so that the organism has genetic instructions for adding the acid to its proteins….
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Adrian Tomine–Summer Blonde

Adrian Tomine’s latest collection, Summer Blonde, contains four 32-page stories from his comic Optic Nerve. They are beautiful stories, naturalistic in setting, and all about depressed and socially awkward teens and twenty-somethings…
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25th Hour

25th Hour, Spike Lee’s latest film, is actually pretty good–despite the rumors of Lee’s decline as a filmmaker, and despite the fact that this is one of his films with a largely white cast, that doesn’t deal at all with African American issues (which is not to say that it ignores race)… (Warning: spoilers to follow)
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Jane Jacobs–The Nature of Economies

Jane Jacobs is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which revolutionized thought about urban planning in the 1960s. But in her 80s she is still very much alive, and intellectually vigorous. Her latest book, The Nature of Economies, is surprisingly fresh and provocative, if also deeply problematic….
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R-Xmas

One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2003 was to write more in this blog than I did last year–even if the entries are less polished (& hence less good).

I’ll start by talking about Abel Ferrara’s R-Xmas–which I think is the greatest Christmas movie, ever….
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No Such Thing

Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing got almost no favorable notice when it came out in 2001. But I found it deep and compelling, one of Hartley’s best films. It’s sort of his version of Beauty and the Beast, or maybe Songs of Innocence and Experience…
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