politics January 13, 2016

Suffer the Little Children: On Macbeth and Steve Jobs

Over the next few days, Film Forum is showing three very different Macbeths: Orson Welles’s from 1948 (the director’s cut, complete with the Scottish brogues the studio had dubbed over), Akira Kurosawa’s from 1957 (Throne of Blood), and Roman Polanski’s from 1971. But the most recent film adaptation of Macbeth, released last month and still hanging on in theaters, is Justin Kurzel’s (with a screenplay by Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie, and Todd Louiso), in which Michael Fassbender plays the king as a scarred survivor, traumatized by war and by the death of his infant son.

The new Macbeth opens

interviews January 15, 2015

Bookforum talks with Miranda July

In Miranda July’s films and short stories, the protagonist is usually shut off from the world: insular, habit-prone, and to the outside world, a little weird, The beauty of Cheryl Glickman, the narrator of July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man, is that she’s come to see her idiosyncrasies as totally logical, After reading several pages of Cheryl’s chatty internal monologue, the reader will, too.

In Miranda July’s films and short stories, the protagonist is usually shut off from the world: insular, habit-prone, and, to the outside world, a little weird. The beauty of Cheryl Glickman, the narrator of July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man, is that she’s come to see her idiosyncrasies as totally logical. After reading several pages of Cheryl’s chatty internal monologue, the reader will, too.

Forty-something, single, and childless, Cheryl works at a non-profit organization that makes self-defense videos for women. She has maintained a years-long infatuation with a man at work, conducted

culture December 12, 2014

The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus

To think about the history of rock songs as a progression is to ignore the ongoing conversation between them. No simple, linear history—even, or maybe especially, one that aims for comprehensiveness—can capture the music’s complexity and vigor.

As if to get it over with, Greil Marcus opens his History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs with something resembling an official account: a five-page list of names of the inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, from Chuck Berry to Nirvana to the likely-to-be-inducted Beyoncé and Jay Z. The point is what the list doesn’t give us. It may be “fun enough” to sift through the memorabilia that depict the story of rock ’n’ roll “in the basically familiar way,” as Marcus quotes the artist Allen Ruppersberg saying after a visit to the Hall of Fame. But no simple, linear history—even, or maybe especially,

Lara Zarum