Consider for a moment, though, how it (or any other constraint, for that matter) works. It places a restriction on the expressions and phrases that can be used in a poem, and it determines to some extent what the poet…
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A review of Life, Death & Bialys by Dylan Schaffer
Life, Death & Bialys is a very personal book. Dylan tells us much about himself, and what he tells us is the kind of thing that most of us can’t talk about. Dylan is fearlessly self-revelatory. He strips briskly and without…
A review of Jamie’s Dinners by Jamie Oliver
Clearly the impact of having a family has had a positive influence on Jamie Oliver and there is no hint of the dilettante about Jamie’s dinners. The food tastes superb, is easy to cook, is child friendly (really!), is nice…
Single Man Seeks World Conquest: Ricky Martin’s Life
While some of Ricky Martin’s songs refer to things that are important to many, such as love, friendship, and family, I would not say that the songs reveal their importance or addto the meaning of their importance. This—Ricky Martin’s Life—is a forcefully entertaining recording—rigorously planned and executed, and though performed with some charm and energy, I would not confuse that with spontaneity or deep sincerity.
A review of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst has talent, and talent for which he has won awards, but his expression of that talent seems limited by the assumptions he has inherited and accepted about the subjects he handles—and also by his consciousness of the effects…
A review of Eva Cassidy’s Songbird
“I Know You By Heart,” written by Diane Scanlon and Eve Nelson, is about the lasting intimacy of love, and Cassidy’s version of “People Get Ready” is the best version of the Curtis Mayfield song I’ve heard. Pete Seeger’s “Oh, Had I A Golden Thread,” apparently one of Cassidy’s favorite songs, has a wistfully maternal quality, while Harburg and Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” skirts various sentimental associations but Cassidy does not embarrassingly indulge them.
A Great Singer, Not a Great Record: Al Green’s Everything’s OK
Al Green is a great singer, but Everything’s OK is not a great album. Should I say more? Al Green is an advising, asking, and beseeching man, a bragging, confirming, declaring, and desiring man, explaining, thanking, moaning, murmuring, proposing, remembering, seducing, sighing, soothing, and…surrendering. How do I know? It is in his singing—usually; however, I found his collection of songs Everything’s OK less than revelatory, actually disappointing.
Seeing Palestine from Italy: Private, directed by Saverio Costanzo
Of what use is a film or video, a work that gives us more of the images that we have seen—of cruelty—on the television news; of more of the questions that poets and professors have tried to speak to many of us for decades; of more of the history we have known, forgotten, known, and forgotten again? Privatemakes it possible for us to believe we are seeing individuals, that we are being given true emotions and thoughts.
A review of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
But however present the moral question is in this story, it is never directly raised, and Ishiguro resists the urge to make it obvious. If these people are artistic and capable of love, is their tragedy any greater? If they…
A review of Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
What is extraordinary about these stories is the intense fragility of the voice, which has an almost otherworldly texture sometimes. Or rather, no: not otherworldly. Instead, it is a voice that seems able to encompass both the next world and…