Harvey Blume

Arts Remembrance: His Soapbox Was The Brillo Box — Arthur Danto, 1/1/1924 –10/25/2013

November 12, 2013
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The late Arthur Danto was open to and appreciative of all sorts of possibilities in art, as other visual arts critics were not.

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Book Review: “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” — Brooklyn Fiction That is a Breed Apart

October 30, 2013
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The moral urgency and the humane distribution of Adelle Waldman’s authorial sympathy are evident everywhere in “The Love Affair of Nathaniel P.”

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Short Fuse News: “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” — A PBS Series Not to be Missed

October 24, 2013
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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 Africans who grew rich on slave trade.

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Short Fuse Interview: The Enigma of Vo Nguyen Giap — Military Mastermind, or “Marginalized Hero”?

October 19, 2013
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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 consistently and adamantly opposed it.

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Short Fuse Book Review: “Dissident Gardens” — Fantasy Meets Radical Politics

September 21, 2013
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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, to start with, his special genius for absorption.

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Short Fuse Film Review: “The Attack” — A Compelling Look at the Conflict Between Israelis and Palestinians

August 22, 2013
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The Attack is a movie that tries to get to the core of violence without dissolving into its depiction.

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Fuse News: Farewell, Elmore Leonard

August 20, 2013
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Writer Elmore Leonard, passed away on Tuesday, 8/20/13, 87 years old. Age no doubt chipped away at him physically but not so far as I could tell at his style and his prose.

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Movie Review: “Elysium” Lost?

August 14, 2013
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My point is that whatever distinguished District 9 and made it so special is entirely absent from director Neill Blomkamp’s blockbuster, Elysium.

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Short Fuse Book Review: “Zealot” — Jesus as Jewish Peasant and Revolutionary

August 14, 2013
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I am a secular Jew who can’t but welcome Zealot‘s conclusion that Christianity pulled a role reversal on Jesus, and made this failed revolutionary Jew into someone who eschewed his people and its traditions in favor of Roman power.

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Fuse News: Paleo-Atheism, Susan Jacoby, sexting. . .

August 1, 2013
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New media always abets the power to articulate fantasy and fetish.

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