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Boobs, Sex, Drugs, and Skrillex – The (Non-Disney) Fairytale of “Spring Breakers”
Spring Breakers is a movie that is just like its trailer. And that’s something. A lot of movies have fantastic trailers and then you find that they contained the only good parts of the movie. Some movies are a lot better than their vague, palatable trailers, like Silver Linings Playbook. But with Spring Breakers, you…
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The Art of War: Our New (Un)reality, Ten Years After the Invasion of Iraq
After a stint in Santa Fe, the exhibit More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness has just opened at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The show’s theme is the way that contemporary artists play with perceptions of reality, and the pieces selected by curator Elizabeth Armstrong suggest that the pliability of truth has become a central…
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Why Do Sci-Fi Writers Never See Communications Technology Coming?
When predicting advances in transportation technology, sci-fi writers always overshoot the mark. We were supposed to have flying cars, for example, decades ago, and a lot of 20th century sci-fi writers had people living on Mars right about now and living to see the invention of faster-than-light travel. Transporter beams? Child’s play. And yet, no…
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The Increasing Pressure to “Write What You Know” and the Resulting Solipsism of Gen Y Authors
One thing I’ve noticed happening slowly over the past few years is an increasing anger around any stories where people perceive someone is writing about something that they have not themselves experienced. This pertains of course to white male authors writing as black females but also just to people writing about a type of drug…
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My Semi-Ironic College Spring Break Trip to Disney World, 1997
This is the spring of Spring Breakers, which reminded me that I too had a college spring break trip to Florida; though my friends and I didn’t do a lot of the things Selena Gomez et al do in the movie (make out, do coke, commit murder), it was still an epic journey in my…
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On Grand Gestures: How Life Is, and Is Not, Like a Movie
For those who haven’t seen it I won’t give away the ending of the second season of Girls, but I’ll say that it ends with a grand, cinematic gesture by someone who’s trying to make a relationship work. It was all too familiar—I haven’t done that, but I’ve made grand gestures. Running through the rain, handwriting 20-page…