Harvey Blume
The Bobby Fischer that the documentary portrays is both a creature of the Cold War era, shouldering that burden, and a peculiarly American hero. It airs this Monday, June 6, on HBO Bobby Fischer Against the World. Directed by Liz Garbus. By Harvey Blume ( Also in The Arts Fuse: Harvey Blume’s thoughts on Fischer’s…
Read MoreI feel like such a nag, but someone ought to be able to point out a 300 lb gorilla in the room when it knuckle walks, glowers and pounds the walls. I will be that very nag and shortly name the ape accordingly. Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the…
Read MoreFor a film in which politics are of such moment, “Miral” longs to be apolitical — or just sublimely fuzzy. Schnabel wanted to make something warmhearted, beautiful, and decent, something that would give you a hint of how history — roughly from Partition to the Oslo accords — looked from the Palestinian side, and he has
succeeded …
Boomers: part 1 By Harvey Blume. ** He lay there watching names scroll by in his head. Credits on screen, white on black background. Last Waltz Boomers Class Reunion Names. He thinks of names of dogs he had known, also cats, goats, ex-lovers. Most things ex by now, most everything ex. Ex-bladder control. Ex-cardiac tissue.…
Read MoreWords of solace and insight for the New Year culled by Harvey Blume (Short Fuse)—the sentiments are shared by the rest of the Arts Fuse contributors and editorial staff. This has been a great year for the magazine, and there are exciting developments to come. ========================================= My aim is: to teach you to pass from…
Read MoreWhat An Object of Beauty proves is that while people were fixated on his Hollywood day job, Steve Martin has made himself into a genuine novelist who gives the art world over the last 20 years an exquisitely balanced sort of attention. An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin. Grand Central Publishing,295 pages, $26.99. By…
Read MoreOddly, not everyone is concerned with vampires. A friend tells me he finds them overdone, ornate, weighed down with baroque bells and whistles. His vote goes to zombies. I reply that zombies are one-trick monsters. They don’t even suck, only bite. That, he says, is what he likes about them; they are stripped down, perfect…
Read MoreIn his latest novel, Michael Cunningham writes about Manhattan’s art world with canny insight and sympathy. But he goes beyond that, anchoring his story not only in beauty, as it is constantly reconceived and imagined, but in considerations of love, sex, morality, and mortality. By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages,…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume Short Fuse and the Arts Fuse will continue to follow and comment on this story. We welcome your thoughts as well. Updates on the Marc Hauser story here, here, and, here. And now more — here and here. The latest here As of August 12, 2010, Marc Hauser has taken a year…
Read MoreCritic Paul Berman’s problem with the arts plays too significant a role in his work to be written off as but the tin ear of an historian and social thinker with weightier matters on his mind; his misreading of the arts is a fulcrum of his social thinking. The Flight of the Intellectuals, by Paul…
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