Read an excerpt from the of Wes Anderson's film adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox...
Fantastic Mr. Fox Directed by Wes Anderson 20th CeRead an excerpt from the of Wes Anderson's film adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox...
Fantastic Mr. Fox Directed by Wes Anderson 20th Century Fox
Reviewed by Sarah Silver
Wes Anderson’s instantly recognizable storybook manner of filmmaking � characters smack dab in the middle of symmetrical frames, crowded by descriptive personal paraphernalia � owes much to the traditionally clear, organized style of children’s literature and comic books. Libraries are revered in both Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, the latter going so far as to open with a bird’s-eye view of an eponymous book being stamped and checked out to an invisible book-lover. Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox, Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s novella, begins by paying homage to nearly every Disney children’s book adaptation from Snow White to The Jungle Book to Robin Hood: a stop-motion animated book opens, reminding us to respect the written word behind the story to come.
Anderson’s affinity for Fox makes sense, since the anti-hero is a rapscallion struggling to balance animal instincts with paternal responsibilities � an apt description of the typical Andersonian father figure (Herman Blume, Royal Tenenbaum, Steve Zissou) cracking under the pressure of midlife crisis. Mr. Fox, a.k.a. Foxy, is fed up with his family’s underground dwelling and, against the advice of his lawyer (a badger), he acts on his itch to move his family into a tree perilously close to the farms of Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, who have a variety of specialties (chickens, ducks, and turkeys and cider, respectively) and a shared hatred of thieving foxes. Foxy, an unstoppable bandit in his youth, can’t seem to get thieving off his mind, so he enlists his friend Kylie the Opossum (the “o� is pronounced) to undertake with him one last act of grand larceny, which turns out, in fact, to be threefold: steal the prized goods of first Boggis, then Bunce, then Bean.
Although a stop-motion animation film may seem at first blush like strange new territory for Anderson, a film that allows the nit-picking director to micromanage everything � from the needles on which the characters� sweaters are knit (hand-whittled ones) to how often they blink (surprisingly infrequently by stop-motion standards) � is actually the next logical step in his career. While his earlier films already prove too much for Anderson’s critics, who accuse him of solipsism and self-indulgence, they are nothing if not impressive proof of the degree to which an auteur can have control over every aspect of his films, to a degree on par with Hitchcock and Tati. But, for all their exacting direction, neither of those artists ever oversaw the creation, out of wire and plasticine, of his entire cast, and then went on to have final approval of each character’s every facial expression.
Read an from Doug Wright's introduction to the reissue of Tennessee Williams' The Night Of The Iguana
The following is an introduction by Doug Read an from Doug Wright's introduction to the reissue of Tennessee Williams' The Night Of The Iguana
The following is an introduction by Doug Wright to Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana, excerpted from the version of Williams' play recently reissued by New Directions Publishing.
UNCLE TENNESSEE
My mother had a headache, and so I came to know the work of Tennessee Williams.
Dallas, Texas, is a more sophisticated city now, but in 1974 it was still a cultural backwater, and my parents were absolutely vigilant about exposing us to the intermittent art that came our way. The local university hosted an annual subscription series: for a modest fee, you could attend lectures, concerts, literary readings, and plays throughout the year. Eagerly, my parents joined.
Subscription nights were very special indeed. My mother would apply lipstick (something she rarely did), my father would come home from his law offi ce on the early side, and together they’d leave my siblings and me in the company of our elderly babysitter, who’d turn on the TV, pop some Jiffy - Pop, and pray for the best. The next morning over breakfast, Mom and Dad would regale us with tales of PDQ Bach and his hilarious piano, or recount the thrill of hearing Garson Kanin read from one of his novels.
But one evening in the fall of my twelfth year, my mother announced that she was feeling peaked; it was one of her sinus headaches. That meant that my father was saddled with an extra ticket. He could go by himself, or recruit one of the children. My brother was more interested in his model planes than art with a capital “A,� and my sister was too young to sit still for two hours, so I was drafted.
Of course, I’d been to the theater before. I’d seen children’s fare at the Junior Player’s Guild, ranging from Rumpelstiltskin to Frog and Toad, and I knew Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel by heart. I’d even been to a grown - up play: Life with Father by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse.
But if my parents had known the bill that evening, they might have been more circumspect. After all, I was at an impressionable age. Still, they were progressive people, and I’m sure they reasoned that a night spent in the presence of a Great American Drama � any Great American Drama —was preferable to one in front of the idiot box. Why shouldn’t they expose me to the canon early? It’s never too early, is it, to instill a life - long love of literature? And that’s how I came to see a touring production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
I don’t recall the name of the theater company. I don’t recall the cast. In truth, I don’t know if it was a professional or an amateur production.
What do I remember? Decades later, I can still recall the image of Blanche, pristine in white gloves, entering the lurid world of the French Quarter as a jazz saxophonist plaintively wails in the night. I can’t forget Stanley, crudely handsome, his chest bare, strutting about the stage like a prizefighter in a red silk robe that clung to his physique like Saran - Wrap. (It was the first time I’d seen a man as lovingly eroticized as the Playboy Bunnies I’d glanced at the drugstore newsstand; it mesmerized and terrified me at the same time.) Echoing in my ears, I can still hear the horrible cry of “Fire! Fire!� as our heroine, her hair now wild and loose, and her prim suit replaced by a disheveled kimono, tries to incite and suppress potential rape.
Most of all, I remember hearing music as recognizable and singular as Gershwin or Mozart, with as distinct and enduring a melody. But it wasn’t born of instruments; it was borne of words. It was the same vernacular my grandmother used when I visited her in Springfi eld, Missouri (“You’ve such fragile, fair skin for a little boy,� she’d say, or “It’s the last dress I’m ever going to buy, pale peach, to match the lining of my casket�), but elevated to the level of poetry. It wasn’t naturalistic; it was somehow truer. It conveyed the terrors and the pleasures of life with greater acuity than spontaneous speech ever could. And though the play was performed in a darkened theater for hundreds of spectators, I felt instead that it had been whispered in my ear by the author, imparted as a delicious and mortifying secret that only the two of us shared.
When I left the theater that night, there were three people in my father’s navy - blue Lincoln Continental. Dad was in the driver’s seat, I was next to him, and perched in the back, invisible except to me, sat a figure in a Panama hat and crumpled linen suit, with the slightest hint of liquor on his breath. During the play, he’d slyly implicated himself in my life; I knew he wasn’t leaving anytime soon. He caught my glance in the rearview mirror. The wicked twinkle in his eye and the sad, wise cackle when he laughed carried a promise: he was my new Uncle. He would teach me all the reckless, impolite truths about life no one else in the confines of my hometown possibly could. Some would be salacious. Others would be too moving, too profound to bear. All of them would be well beyond the purview of my mom and dad.
Later that week when our art teacher at school assigned dioramas, I took a shoebox, doll furniture from my sister, and scraps of fabric from mother’s sewing box, and built my own model of the Kowalski residence, complete with tiny beer bottles and a Chinese lantern fashioned from tissue paper. That same week, I stole an old bathrobe of my mother’s and a stringy blonde wig from our box of Halloween costumes, and put them on, so that I could intone tragically before the mirror, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.� When Mother poured me a soda pop one day after school, I flashed a coy smile and inquired coquettishly in my best antebellum drawl, “Is this ... just Coke?� She just looked at me, baffled.
Read the of Grant Heslov's film adaptation of Men Who Stare At Goats
Postwar: The Messenger and The Men Who Stare at Goats
Smugness mRead the of Grant Heslov's film adaptation of Men Who Stare At Goats
Postwar: The Messenger and The Men Who Stare at Goats
Smugness marches on in The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney and directed by his bestie, actor Grant Heslov. While I don’t think it’s too soon to mine the Iraq War for chuckles, this shrill, irritating, and incredibly self-satisfied effort mostly amuses itself. It’s not always fair to compare comedy to drama, but The Messenger, which also aims to show a side of the war you don’t see, is also funnier, thanks to its precise gallows humor and Woody Harrelson. In another one of his slapstick-throwback performances, Clooney mugs it up as Lyn Cassady, a Special Forces operator in Iraq who schools journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) to the U.S. Army’s past and current employment of parapsychological tactics in combat. Through Lyn, Bob meets the experimental New Earth Army’s founder (Jeff Bridges), Lyn’s former partner (Kevin Spacey), and is kidnapped by a criminal gang in Iraq.
Excerpt: Steadman on Steadman interview (archives)
In February, writer Sally Vincent sat down in the home studio of artist Ralph Steadman, 70, in Kent,Excerpt: Steadman on Steadman interview (archives)
In February, writer Sally Vincent sat down in the home studio of artist Ralph Steadman, 70, in Kent, England for a cover story interview. Below is an excerpt of that conversation, available in full in
Stop Smiling: You stopped drawing politicians a while back. Have you ever been tempted to start again?
Ralph Steadman: I stopped in 1987 because it felt indecent to draw someone you wouldn’t ask home for supper. But that was just personal. I thought there was something unwholesome about political caricature based on the certain knowledge that each time you draw one of the bastards it feeds into their monstrous egos, because they always want to own the drawing. No matter how bad the likeness, how hideous the caricature, to them it’s a powerful rendition, fodder for their insatiable egos. The more wicked and cruel the portrait, the more passionately they want to own it, as though they have somehow earned the glory of this vicious, awful vituperation. It is only a one-man campaign to wither the inflated sense of self-importance of our venal representatives. I doubt there’s a politician alive who has felt the draught of my indifference. And no, I’ve never been tempted. I wouldn’t give any of them the satisfaction.
Read an excerpt from A People's History of Sports at :
JORDAN, INC.
Much is expected of those with power. And no athlete has ever hadRead an excerpt from A People's History of Sports at :
JORDAN, INC.
Much is expected of those with power. And no athlete has ever had more and done less than Michael Jeffrey Jordan.
The 1990s in sports saw the corporatization of the game gain an even stronger hand. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant there were new markets to conquer and new products to shill. Athletes on the whole didn’t want to take a stand and become the next Craig Hodges. As basketball all-star Chris Webber said,
“People will be so worried about how they will be seen by history or how their commercials are going to be taken away. Now the thing is, ‘Don’t step out of line.� Now the cool thing is, ‘I don’t want to be looked at. Don’t separate me; don’t pick on me.� I’ve even felt that way a couple of times, too � and that’s not good. We have so much influence; I don’t think we know how much we have.�
TMOTTGoGo is not the only magazine devoted to go-go. Go Go Swings takes into aRead an excerpt from The Beat! at
THE WORD
TMOTTGoGo is not the only magazine devoted to go-go. Go Go Swings takes into account not only the music but fashion as well. Though it is not published on-line and comes out on a less reliable schedule, Go Go Swings aims to reach the same audience as Kato’s publication: a hip, young, black and urban (mostly from D.C. and Prince George’s County) readership who are aware of what they eat, how they look, where they work and what music they consume.
Read an excerpt from an interview with Carey Mulligan, actress in the film adaptation of An Education at
British sensation Carey MuRead an excerpt from an interview with Carey Mulligan, actress in the film adaptation of An Education at
British sensation Carey Mulligan is a poised, fearless and inventive 23-year-old actress. In Danish director Lone Scherfig’s An Education, set in 1961 London, Mulligan plays Jenny, a sophisticated, if somewhat dreamy 16-year-old schoolgirl who finds herself irrevocably succumbing to the mysterious charms of a Jewish aesthete (sharply played by Peter Sarsgaard).
It’s a bravura performance that manages to be both emotionally charged and sharply unsentimental. Mulligan’s quick, emotional alertness and sexual precocity is staggering. In the film, she plays the part of a young Francophile. The novelist Nick Hornby adapted the story from the memoir of journalist Lynn Barber, and it has the free, spontaneous momentum of early French New Wave films...
Wayne White, who hails from rural Tennessee, is a Pop Art renaissanRead the
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Taking Off the Ankle Weights
Wayne White, who hails from rural Tennessee, is a Pop Art renaissance man. Largely self-taught, he has worked for three decades as an illustrator, painter, cartoonist and puppeteer. He is the creative mind behind a bevy of projects, ranging from the surrealistic Eighties television show Pee-wee’s Playhouse (for which he won three Emmy’s for his puppet designs) to art direction for the unforgettable Peter Gabriel video “Big Time� (for which he won a Billboard award for best Art Direction) to set designs for Smashing Pumpkins� “Tonight, Tonight� and lithographed covers for the alt-country band Lampchop (he contributed artwork to four of the band’s albums). In more recent years, he has produced formal works of sculpture, and turned out an ongoing series of text-based pictures he makes from found paintings he covers in words and phrases, positioning the lettering into the original landscape. Although his word-driven art has been frequently compared to the work of Edward Ruscha, White assures STOP SMILING that he didn’t have Ruscha in mind when he first started painting in what has now become one of his signature styles. This past summer, coming off the heals of his Todd Oldham-designed first book, Maybe Now I’ll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve (Ammo Books), White carved out some time to answer a few questions.
From the essay "Black News" in Notes From No Man's Land:
When I was not the only white person Read an excerpt from No Man's Land at
From the essay "Black News" in Notes From No Man's Land:
When I was not the only white person at the events I covered for the [San Diego Voice and Viewpoint:], the other white person was usually a politician. Once I arrived at a speech by a candidate for state assembly, Vince Hall, and sat down at a table next to an elderly man who looked at me, looked at my camera, looked at Vince Hall, and asked me, with a tilt of his head, “You related to him?�
When I talk about my family to strangers, I occasionally describe it as mixed. Because I don’t appear to be of mixed race, this term usually confuses people. What I mean is not specifically that my mother’s sister married a black man from Jamaica and had two children, and that one of these cousins came to live with my family when I was in junior high, and that I lived with the other cousin in Brooklyn after I graduated from college. And I don’t mean specifically that my mother’s sister later remarried and adopted a black son, or that my mother’s other sister adopted a Cherokee daughter. And I don’t mean specifically that my mother lived with a black man after her divorce from my father, and that his daughter lived with us as my stepsister, and that later, when my stepsister lost custody of her baby, my mother raised the baby for some time. And I don’t mean specifically that my mother later married a man from China, and that his daughter is now another sister in my family. What I mean is all of this. And what I said to the man who asked me if I was related to the other white person in the room was, “As much as you are.�
The final Walkers album, Images, was released that April, immediately cRead an excerpt from The Impossible Dream at .
FINAL IMAGES
The final Walkers album, Images, was released that April, immediately charting at Number Six and gathering their best reviews yet. The band’s long-playing swansong begins with ‘Everything Under The Sun�. It has a stirring start, courtesy of Ronnie Verrell, but it’s soon clear that the song is in one of the few keys that does not suit Scott’s voice.
Read the about the film adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:
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In John Krasinski’s film of Brief Interviews Read the about the film adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:
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In John Krasinski’s film of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, many of the Interviews are conducted at a desk, in front of a bare wall, with a microphone and pitcher of water � like a table read, really, which makes sense given that Krasinski’s first exposure to David Foster Wallace’s stories came as an undergrad taking part in a staged reading of the monologue-length pieces. Making the material less like an evening of student black-box theater and more like a "normal movie," Krasinski contrives a grad student, played by Julianne Nicholson, to have her ear chewed off by the variously self-justifying, wormy and pitiable Men, including her own ex.
Stop Smiling: You’ve said that your target demographic inclu
Read the
Reading About Other People's Lives
Stop Smiling: You’ve said that your target demographic includes hipsters, happy but sensitive teenagers, depressed vegans, Europeans and college students. Does it strike you as odd when other types of people � say, literary critics or editors of magazines � are attracted to your writing?
Tao Lin: No. The way I write, I feel, is within the tradition of what literary critics in every mainstream publication would approve of. But because of other factors, like how often I do things that appear really stupid on the Internet, those people get a sense of who I am and probably associate that with my writing before reading it, or even while reading it, which puts them off. But I feel that all the stupid things I do on the Internet will naturally attract a certain demographic � the one I named. So, by targeting those people, I’ll just maximize how many books I sell.
Read an from Examined Life on STOP SMILING Online:
As dusk fell over Manhattan, I stopped to pick up Cornel West from his midtown hotel. He agrRead an from Examined Life on STOP SMILING Online:
As dusk fell over Manhattan, I stopped to pick up Cornel West from his midtown hotel. He agreed to let me conduct an interview while driving him to the New School, where he was scheduled to give a lecture with the philosopher Simon Critchley. Although Examined Life was conceived as primarily pedestrian, the car ride seemed an appropriate way to bring the peripatetic concept up to date. How else would a modern-day flaneur travel? The cameraman sat in the front passenger seat; West and the soundman, who also operated the second camera, took the back. I did my best to guide the conversation while navigating rush-hour traffic.
The Portable February, David Berman’s second book � following the breakout poetry co
STOP SMILING Slideshow Review:
David Berman's The Portable February
The Portable February, David Berman’s second book � following the breakout poetry collection Actual Air —is a black and white hardcover collection of simple pen and ink drawings. His signature sense of humor � known mostly through his songwriting for the Silver Jews, his former rock ’n� roll group � is on full display in this recent Drag City release. While drug addiction and depression may have plagued Berman for years, he has tried to make the best of the worst of those times, tapping into existential depths and churning out page after page of Thurber-inspired images, many of which would make curiously apt greeting cards; although it’s impossible to discern the true meaning behind each panel, upon reaching the end of the book, it’s obvious Berman’s talents go far beyond singing, songwriting and poetry.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Naked Lunch, we present this 1966 interview with William S.
Monday, August 24, 2009
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Naked Lunch, we present this 1966 interview with William S. Burroughs, which originally appeared in Jaguar Magazine. It was excerpted here from(Semiotext(e), 2001).
STOP SMILING will co-host a celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Naked Lunch this Friday, Aug. 28. for details.
PROPHET OR PORNOGRAPHER
New York, 1966
Jaguar Magazine: You have been accused of being generally against the establishment, and many of your critics read “messages� into much of what the average reader may think of as simply extremely sexy. I refer specifically to the fairly violent scene which might easily be re-read as a kind of social protest � perhaps against capital punishment.
William Burroughs: It’s a tract against capital punishment in the genre of Swift’s Modest Proposal. I was simply following a formula to its logical conclusion. Some people appear to have understood it. The publication of Naked Lunch in England practically coincided with their abolition of capital punishment. The book obviously had a certain effect.
Q&A: Reif Larsen, author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
Tuesday, August 18, 2009 By Eugenia Williamson
Reif Larsen’s debut novel, The Sele
Q&A: Reif Larsen, author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
Tuesday, August 18, 2009 By Eugenia Williamson
Reif Larsen’s debut novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, concerns a cartographic prodigy who ventures alone from Montana to Washington, D.C. to assume his post as a fellow at the Smithsonian Institute.
Larsen’s own story is only a little different. At 29, he’s quite young for a successful novelist. And as anyone who has read anything literature-related in the last calendar year knows, he received a startlingly large, Vanity Fair profile-inducing book deal.
We spoke with him at his parents� kitchen table in the middle of his nation-wide book tour earlier this summer.
In our monthly column, we ask two reviewers to offer their perspective on the same book. The lateRead the STOP SMILING of Entrapment:
In our monthly column, we ask two reviewers to offer their perspective on the same book. The latest entry focuses on Nelson Algren's Entrapment and Other Writings.
Reviewer Beth Capper writes:
Chicago is always at the center of things in Algren's work. It is a city he both loved and despised. Algren's capacity for explaining its appeals and pitfalls is perhaps why he is so adored by its residents, and why his word on Chicago has become the final one. His vision of the city is at once romantic and foreboding: its unforgiving winters and its back streets lit by "indifferent stars."
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And from Gretchen Kalwinski:
These short works are a solid survey of Algren’s still-vibrant writing, but contemporary readers may stumble on the Entrapment passages where he uses a noir-ish, “daddy-o� jazz-language to render period-specific street poetry to an almost-goofy affect.
A Canadian boy drops out Read the with Clancy Martin:
Clancy Martin Tells the Truth Even When He Lies
By Nathan Martin
A Canadian boy drops out of high school to join his brother in Texas as a fine jewelry salesman. He becomes embroiled in the lies, cheats, vice and deceptions that permeate the industry, and certain parts of him become crushed and twisted, although he emerges a wiser man. This is the story of Bobby Clark, the fictional narrator of How to Sell (FSG), but it’s also the story of author Clancy Martin. The degree to which the narrator’s often-repugnant confessions correlate to the actual experiences of his creator is unclear, although Martin would probably tell you if you asked � he’s admitted on record to drug addiction, suicide attempts and defrauding customers (which, it seems, are the details most interviewers are interested in).
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