“How to Stop Time”: I review “Only Lovers Left Alive”

Last updated on: May 9, 2014 at 9:44 am By Eve Tushnet

for AmCon: There’s a lot to love about this swoony, drifty vampire flick, a sensual opium dream which unfurls in a lushly-colored musical haze. Tilda Swinton was born to play a vampire, with her giant sepulcher-face full of bones. She’s magnetic, as are the cityscapes, a bleached-white Tangiers and half-abandoned Detroit. The blood=drug equation isn’t subtle, but there’s a subtler, haunting motif of music and nostalgia as ecstatic drugs in which we lose ourselves. The vampires are drunk on their... Read more

“Amends”: My Novel Seeking Agent/Publisher

Last updated on: May 8, 2014 at 7:59 pm By Eve Tushnet

So I wrote a comedic novel set during the filming of a reality-TV show about alcohol rehabilitation. It is basically all my obsessions on parade: bad advice, humiliation, addiction and recovery, Gay Christian Whatnot, journalism, sleaze, mysticism and mystical experience, metanarratives, friendship, prison, and class war. You get a recipe for a Clockwork Orange (the drink that removes your free will!) and a romance between a guilt-ridden conservative journalist and an Ethiopian Orthodox homeless visionary. A collections agent pays back... Read more

A Backwards Catechism

Last updated on: May 6, 2014 at 12:58 pm By Eve Tushnet

This excellent post from A Queer Calling has been getting a lot of attention: …First, a bit of context: there were twenty students in the class, mainly from Christian backgrounds. Thirteen identified as Catholic, five identified as Protestant, and two identified as atheist/agnostic. Of the thirteen Catholic students, ten had attended a Catholic high school. Eight of those had been through twelve years of Catholic education. Three Protestant students and one atheist/agnostic student had received education at Christian high schools.... Read more

Cherry Blossom Season in Japan

Last updated on: May 6, 2014 at 1:06 am By Eve Tushnet

Some luminous photos. Via Ratty. Read more

From Josip Novakovich, “April Fool’s Day”

Last updated on: May 6, 2014 at 1:05 am By Eve Tushnet

“If he’d kept drinking slivovitz, he’d still be all right, I am sure. The trouble with vodka is that it doesn’t feel like anything, so you can drink a whole bottle without vomiting or your throat burning. Slivovitz won’t let you do that–when you drink it, you know you are drinking.” “You are right about that. After two glasses, your stomach is on fire, and after three, you are vomiting. That’s a good safety check built right into the drink.... Read more

“Stuff Christian Singles Hear”

Last updated on: May 3, 2014 at 11:02 pm By Eve Tushnet

I’m late to this party, but come on, “Jesus is your girlfriend now!” is genius: Read more

From “Master of Reality”

Last updated on: May 3, 2014 at 9:07 pm By Eve Tushnet

I got this calendar free with dinner at New China up on Foothill. They were giving them away if you ate there in January. One thing about me is that I always get maximum use out of free things. When the managers from around the country all went to San Diego for the region-wide management training summit, I kept all the soaps and shampoos from the hotel room they’d put me in. I also kept the toothpaste. And I didn’t... Read more

Hard Man Humble: I review “Dom Hemingway”

Last updated on: May 1, 2014 at 10:03 am By Eve Tushnet

for AmSpec: Richard Shepard’s Dom Hemingway, starring Jude Law as an aging felon and Richard E. Grant (yes) as his best friend, is a bizarre genre hybrid of gangster entertainment and family tearjerker. At first we seem to be solidly in lads’-night-out funland: splashy neon colors, head-butting and gut-punching, terrific music, wenching and boozing and unauthorized smoking. There are rivers of obscenity and wordy, actory speeches. (All of these are given to Law’s titular Dom, which is a shame, since... Read more

From John Darnielle, “Master of Reality”

Last updated on: May 1, 2014 at 9:59 am By Eve Tushnet

Now I feel like a freak. Kids at State used to call each other “freak,” it was like the meanest thing you could call a guy until he’d been there long enough to really stop caring. At that point though it stopped being an insult and became more like a job tile or army rank. Read more

Transported in Time: Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney

Last updated on: April 27, 2014 at 9:12 pm By Eve Tushnet

So I’m in Sydney, and it’s amazing. Beautiful weather (and what I’m gonna call sublime weather, the day we went out to Botany Bay and watched the swells breaking on the sandstone in front of a stormy sky), lovely people, majestic cockatoos which sound like fishwives, magpies, aggressive little mynahs harassing giant ravens, ibises rooting around everywhere the way we have Canada geese at home, shaggy gum trees, palm trees, hibiscus. And also, there’s the Hyde Park Barracks, which was... Read more