The trippiness, the nudge regarding unused powers, regarding vision, regarding the potential of our minds, are the best parts of Lucy.
Short Fuse
Book Review: An Evocative Biography of Zionist Agitator and Writer Vladmir Jabotinsky
There’s room to wonder if Vladmir Jabotinsky would have accepted Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu as his legitimate Zionist heirs.
Fuse Museum Notes: The American Folk Art Museum goes down, Harvard Art Museums go dark
Significant changes in the world of the art museum can trigger roiling controversy or transpire in problematic quiet.
Poetry Commentary: Thoughts on Reading a New Translation of The Iliad
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 approximation of its sounds.
Arts Remembrance: His Soapbox Was The Brillo Box — Arthur Danto, 1/1/1924 –10/25/2013
The late Arthur Danto was open to and appreciative of all sorts of possibilities in art, as other visual arts critics were not.
Book Review: “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” — Brooklyn Fiction That is a Breed Apart
The moral urgency and the humane distribution of Adelle Waldman’s authorial sympathy are evident everywhere in “The Love Affair of Nathaniel P.”
Short Fuse News: “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” — A PBS Series Not to be Missed
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.
Short Fuse Interview: The Enigma of Vo Nguyen Giap — Military Mastermind, or “Marginalized Hero”?
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.
Short Fuse Book Review: “Dissident Gardens” — Fantasy Meets Radical Politics
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.
Short Fuse Film Review: “The Attack” — A Compelling Look at the Conflict Between Israelis and Palestinians
The Attack is a movie that tries to get to the core of violence without dissolving into its depiction.