Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
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It’s difficult to overstate the radical rewiring of humanity and our role in the world that occurred in Shakespeare’s era, fundamentally altering the nature of our relationship with ourselves, others, and reality itself. A rewriting that might be breaking down today... The late, great literary critic and legendary scholar Harold Bloom once claimed that William… Continue reading Shakespeare and the end of humanity as we know it
Few, if any endings are more tragic, but therein lies Shakespeare’s clever trick. To produce such an effect, he hid a tragedy in what is truly a comedy, the comedy of life itself. Everyone knows Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy because any play that ends with two young lovers, the main characters of… Continue reading Romeo and Juliet and the true nature of tragedy and comedy
Much like music, a great film can exist purely on an emotional level, as a stream of loosely related and structured consciousness that teases us with symbolism, impenetrable to a complete analysis, and yet filled with meaning all the same. Federico Fellini’s 1963 surrealistic fantasy about a film director struggling with his love life and… Continue reading Fellini’s 8½ and whether or not reality matters in either art or life itself
The Bard wasn’t a scientist, unless you consider him an explorer of the human mind as some critics have asserted, and yet if we can divine one overarching theme he pursued, we might say it is uncertainty itself. Sonnet 94 is perhaps his greatest achievement in this regard, as the meaning changes based on the… Continue reading Shakespeare’s quantum mechanics in verse form
In one sense, Hamlet spins out the statement in a play of words, not intended to have any logical meaning, but to confuse his audience, hiding his real thoughts beneath the mask of insanity. In another, it contains the meaning of the entire play and Macbeth besides. O God, I could be bounded in a… Continue reading I could be bounded in a nutshell, Shakespeare’s genius in three cryptic phrases
The Boss released Human Touch and Lucky Town on the same day in 1992 to some of the worst reviews of his career. This doesn’t mean there aren’t stellar songs on both including the most poignant take on jealousy in his canon. By Springsteen standards, the early to mid 1990s was the nadir of his… Continue reading “I Wish I Were Blind,” revisiting Springsteen’s oft forgotten classic from Human Touch
I cannot be the only one increasingly tired with critics hailing recycled ideas packaged in slick ways as modern masterpieces, nor do I think anyone should be impressed that a movie made by a small army at a cost of at least a hundred million dollars looks good. Unless you are a recent arrival from… Continue reading “Barbenheimer,” Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and the dearth of original ideas
The former President enters the book banning debate not by highlighting the troubling trend of retroactively editing classics for progressive political reasons, the presence of borderline pornography in schools, his party’s censorship crusade, or even defending a single book that was unfairly targeted by conservatives in his opinion. Last week, former President Barack Obama wrote… Continue reading Former President Barack Obama is profoundly political and completely wrong
The same as Logan’s children seek to inherit his creation without having done the hard work of building it, hard work which included shady deals, sacrificing morals when convenient, cutting corners when necessary, and screwing over competitors, we inherit a world built by giants from Thomas Edison to Teddy Roosevelt and have no idea what… Continue reading For better or worse, Succession is the ideal show for our times
The Titanic claims another five victims in a story that might be even more illustrative of humanity’s boundless pride than the original tragedy. If the sinking of the world’s largest ocean liner was Shakespeare, the implosion of the Titan is Vonnegut in a sad sign of the decline of our times. For generations, the Titanic… Continue reading The Titanic, the Titan, and humanity’s endless hubris
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 