"People are always knocking on my door and asking about it," he says. "There's something about neon that people just love."

I think I have an idea ...

                  Scene 7: INT.  TRENT'S CAR - NIGHT

                             MIKE
                        (counting bills)
                   I took out three hundred, but I'm only
                   gonna bet with one.  I figure if we buy
                   a lot of chips, the pit boss will see and
                   they'll comp us all sorts of shit, then
                   we trade back the chips at the end of the
                   night.  You gotta be cool though.

                             TRENT
                   I'm cool, baby.  They're gonna give Daddy
                   a room, some breakfast, maybe Bennett's
                   singing.

                             MIKE
                   I'm serious.  This is how you do it.  I'm
                   telling you.

                             TRENT
                   I know.  Daddy's gonna get the Rainman
                   suite.  Vegas, baby.  We're going to
                   Vegas!

                             MIKE
                   Vegas!  You think we'll get there by
                   midnight?

                             TRENT
                   Baby, we're gonna be up by five hundy by
                   midnight.  Vegas, baby!

                             MIKE
                   Vegas!

Love neon art? Well, look up this address

“HAVE YOU SEEN THE ROMANIAN MOVIE?” This somewhat improbable question began to circulate around the midpoint of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. For some reason, the critics, journalists and film-industry hangers-on who gather in Cannes each May to gossip and graze rarely refer to the films they see there by their titles, preferring a shorthand of auteur, genre or country of origin (“the Gus Van Sant”; “the Chinese documentary”; “that Russian thing”). It’s a code that everyone is assumed to know, and in this case there was not much room for confusion. How many Romanian movies could there be?

More than most of us would have predicted as it turned out.

New Wave on the Black Sea

It's said that Art Tatum's technique persuaded a great many aspiring young pianists to become insurance salesmen. Edmund Wilson's chops were equally phenomenal; not as sheerly, immediately dazzling, perhaps, but in range, erudition, penetration, clarity and unfussy elegance, no less jaw-dropping. And just as Tatum's multivolume The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces is one of the summits of piano jazz, the Library of America's new two-volume issue of Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1920s, '30s and '40s is one of the summits of twentieth-century literary criticism.

A Great Deal of Work

It's said that Art Tatum's technique persuaded a great many aspiring young pianists to become insurance salesmen. Edmund Wilson's chops were equally phenomenal; not as sheerly, immediately dazzling, perhaps, but in range, erudition, penetration, clarity and unfussy elegance, no less jaw-dropping. And just as Tatum's multivolume The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces is one of the summits of piano jazz, the Library of America's new two-volume issue of Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1920s, '30s and '40s is one of the summits of twentieth-century literary criticism.

A Great Deal of Work

I introduce a précis of this book with a bit of trepidation, but here goes: Bill McKibben records 24 hours worth of programming from every single one of Fairfax, Virginia’s 93 television stations. Then he watches all of them, eight hours a day, for basically a year. On another day he heads off into the mountains and writes about that. Compare and contrast.

I hesitate because this will give you at least one immediate idea, namely that McKibben is a wanker or condescending, or both. Thankfully McKibben himself was well aware of both possibilities, and avoided them studiously.

It’s a fun book, profound, and a quick read. If you’ve read David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Plurum” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), you’ll have one of the threads, namely a look at TV’s involution. In “E Unibus Plurum,” Wallace noted that television shows increasingly only referred to other television shows: you don’t need to know anything about the culture of the outside world to understand all of the jokes. Wallace, at some level, thought this was cute. He was singularly unwilling to say that television is crap; instead, he took television to be a great object for scholarly study. McKibben has no problem calling out the low quality of most television.

Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

With extraordinary access, BLAST exposes a world of risky, hardcore, scientific adventure. The story follows an international team of astrophysicists trying to launch a multi-million dollar telescope on a NASA high-altitude balloon. Their journey to discover thousands of early galaxies takes them from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Revealing frustrations, inevitable failures and ultimate triumph, BLAST puts a human face on the quest to answer our most basic question - How did we get here?

Blast The Movie

If you've ever watched "The Sopranos" or the 1997 movie "Donnie Brasco," you might have wondered whether killing people is fun. After all, it seems fun to watch, at least on TV. Or maybe it's not the killing that's fun. Maybe it's the planning, the camaraderie, the petty squabbles, and the disdain for normal bourgeois existence that holds our attention. Demanding protection money and dealing drugs seems fun, too. If you've had such thoughts, have I got the social scientist for you.

A Dealer in the Ivory Tower

Read it

NYC2123 | Online Graphic Novel

Anyone who has ever considered technology and its relation to humanity has most likely heard the name Marshall McLuhan. A careful student of media, a prolific lecturer and author, and the coiner of such phrases as “global village” and “the medium is the message,” McLuhan’s career merits a freshly creative and accessible examination as technology speeds ahead and forces us to reconsider our relationship with it.

Everyman’s McLuhan does just that. W. Terrence Gordon, McLuhan’s official biographer, has deciphered and distilled McLuhan’s career; his words are accompanied by colorful and innovative illustrations that apply both McLuhan’s and Gordon’s ideas to the realities of 21st century technology and media. Everyman’s McLuhan furthers a dialogue that was important when McLuhan was alive, but is even more relevant today as the line blurs between humans and the technologies we use.

Everyman's McLuhan

A new and remarkable energy animated the American cinema between the coming of sound at the end of the 1920’s and the strict enforcement of the 1934 Production Code censoring "unwholesome" onscreen behavior. During the pre-Code era Hollywood found commercial and critical success in a series of films that radically expanded the previously acceptable thresholds for exploring sex and crime related themes. The twilight of the Jazz Age and the Great Depression encouraged directors and screenwriters to seriously examine the moral and sociopolitical underpinnings of the changing nation through frank and, quite often, extremely graphic stories designed to titillate and shock. Encouraged by the box office, Hollywood produced startling depictions of infidelity, prostitution, drug use, crime, homosexuality and miscegenation. The injustices of corporate capitalism and the sexual experimentation of the period, particularly by women, were also newly exploited as fitting subjects for the screen.

The frequent mythologization of the pre-Code cinema as an apogee of daring and uncompromised studio filmmaking often obscures the fact that the compromise of the Production Code was, in fact, self-imposed by the studios themselves. Although Hollywood directors and screenwriters would ultimately discover a creative friction working with and against subsequent censorship rules, the films of the pre-Code era reveal the potential of a decidedly unruly cinema largely unrestrained by the mores of polite society. In tribute to and in celebration of this unique and fertile period in American film history the HFA presents a selection of films from pre-Code Hollywood designed to enlighten, shock and entertain.

Vice vs. Virtue in Pre-Code Hollywood