Author Archives: Brown

I Was Born a Blonde Redhead on April 11, 2018

Posted on April 24, 2018 by Brown

An unpopular opinion: Blonde Redhead live-scoring a presentation of Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But… was magnificent. I say this as a cinephile and Ozu fan (can the two be separated?) who generally dislikes the poor etiquette and behavior of … Continue reading →

Posted in Essays, Reviews | Tagged Japan, Reviews, Rock, Silent film, Sociology, Tales of a blown mind, Yasujiro Ozu | Leave a comment

Republic (380? BC, Plato)

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Brown

Everyone who knows Plato knows of Republic and knows of the allegory of the cave, I imagine, or at least my popular-informed conception of Republic considered the cave to be its central point or climax. As reading through the previous … Continue reading →

Posted in Essays, Reviews | Tagged Divisions, Economics, Marriage, Philosophy, Radicalism, Readings, Sociology, Socrates, The City, The Family, The Law | Leave a comment

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928, D. H. Lawrence)

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Brown

At times it seems like reading and writing a novel like this which exalts the immediate bodily and sensory experience of life over the insular and intellectualized is committing a great hypocrisy. The hands that cradle the spine and turn … Continue reading →

Posted in Essays, Reviews | Tagged Ayn Rand, Business, Divisions, Marriage, Philosophy, Readings, Romanticism, Sociology, The Family, The Rural Life | Leave a comment

Manchild in the Promised Land (1965, Claude Brown)

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Brown

I haven’t read very much black literature or drug-culture literature or ghetto-life literature but I’ve never read anything that delves as deeply and as unpretentiously into such topics as this book, whose title and author I’d never heard of before … Continue reading →

Posted in Essays, Reviews | Tagged Creativity, Crime, Drugs, Harlem, New York City, Psychology, Race, Radicalism, Readings, shooting, The Family, The Law | Leave a comment

Kerouac and Wacky Cares

Posted on June 21, 2016 by Brown

So soon after plumbing through the first volume of Marx’s Capital it’s hard not to take a sort of economic-historical analysis to everything else I think about, even the joyfully sensuous meanderings of young men who (like Kerouac) have no … Continue reading →

Posted in Essays, Reviews | Tagged Beats, Buddhism, Fiction, Jack Kerouac, Readings, running on, The Dharma Bums, traveling | Leave a comment

Pablo Marìn, August 11, 2014

Posted on September 13, 2014 by Brown

After a few hours of bombarding myself in the big city with big-screen big-finance digital entertainments – a surprisingly, and even somewhat embarrassingly, for how I thought I self-identified aesthetically, tolerable experience – I shot myself between the termini of … Continue reading →

Posted in Essays, Rambles, Reviews, Trips | Tagged Alexander Dovzhenko, Black Hole Cinematheque, Brian Eno, Cosmology, Creativity, Cycling, Pacific Film Archive, Robin Williams, Sexuality, SF Cinematheque, Tales of a blown mind, The City, TM, Viewings, West Oakland, Word War Disney Wolves | Leave a comment

Poseur Exposure

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Brown

16 Nov 2013: The Marx-Engels Reader (“Circular Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke, and Others,” 1879, Marx) It’s rare to see something nowadays that so forcefully denounces compromise, gradualism and political correctness from a radical thinker when present-day figures like Noam … Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged Capital, Compromise, Incrementalism, Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky, Philosophy, Radicalism, Readings | Leave a comment

Revolutionary Programming Languages

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Brown

15 Nov 2013: The Marx-Engels Reader (“After the Revolution: Marx Debates Bakunin,” 1875, Karl Marx) Crosscurrents of insight roil around inside the somewhat informed reader to see Marx’s contentious rebuttal of the criticisms of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. The first … Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged Economics, Karl Marx, Kronstadt, Lenin, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakunin, Philosophy, Radicalism, Stalin, Trotsky | Leave a comment

Female Troubles

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Brown

15 Nov 2013: La Cotta (DVD, 1967, Ermanno Olmi) Even more than Il Posto this hour-length television feature depicts the sensitive, romantically forlorn young male that appears as prototype for the many subsequent protagonists of Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze and … Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged Ermanno Olmi, Il Posto, Italy, La Cotta, Michel Gondry, Romanticism, Spike Jonze, The City, Viewings, Wes Anderson | Leave a comment

The Slow and the Mild-Mannered: Milano Drift

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Brown

14 Nov 2013: Il Posto (DVD, 1961, Ermanno Olmi) The dreamlike mundanity on offer here harks forward to another Italian, Marco Ferreri, but with more of a focus on cinematography and even more of a locational drift. The camera itself … Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged Aeschylus, Business, Dreamlife, Ermanno Olmi, Il Posto, Italy, Marco Ferreri, Romanticism, The City, The Family, Viewings, Wes Anderson | Leave a comment