From the pandemic’s beginning, Charles Finch uses the crisis as a nearly daily backdrop for musings on all sorts. The results are at once cathartic, frightening, exasperating, and often hilarious.
Review
Film Review: “Jockey” – (A Battle to Get Back in the Saddle)
An upstart young rider confronts an aging jockey. Yet there’s nary a cliché.
Film Reviews: Sundance 2022, Dispatch #4 — Trauma and Terror
When given a choice, tend to choose films that are fairly harrowing to watch. The next three Sundance Fest films on my slate were often disturbing, but also powerful and inspiring on many levels.
Opera Review: Arabs on the Operatic Stage — Meyerbeer’s 1814 Comic Opera about the Mysterious ‘East’
Long before the often-prejudicial portrayals of Middle Easterners in Hollywood films, opera composers crafted insightful works from 1001 Nights.
Book Review: “Ghost Geographies” — Dark but Magical Stories of the Dispossessed and the Stateless
Tamas Dobozy is an anarchist in the best sense of the word: it’s not chaos he’s enamored of but a way of life untrammeled by political oppression, bureaucratic horrors, legal absurdities.
Film Reviews: Sundance 2022, Dispatch #3 — What Remains
I’ve seen a really interesting assortment of films so far. I can’t recite them all from memory, but they’re not blurring into each other, either. Not yet, anyway.
Book Review: “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days” — Innovative History of a Female Anti-Nazi Resistance Leader
What holds this wildly ambitious book together and drives the narrative is Rebecca Donner’s unwavering, partisan voice.
Film Review: “Mad God” – God’s in His Heaven, All’s Forsaken With the World
Think Ray Harryhausen by way of the Quay brothers or Jan Švankmajer and you’ll have a vague sense of the sort of magnificent black magic that animatesMad God.
Book Review: “From a Distant Relation” — Drowning in Yiddish
What is evident throughout these superb tales of turn-of-century shtetl life is their authenticity.
Jazz Album Review: Guitarist Dave Stryker’s “As We Are” — A Successful Synthesis
Unlike a lot of modern jazz releases, this isn’t so much about displaying virtuosity (though all the musicians are virtuosos) as it is about setting a mood and a groove and dancing on top of it.