Author: chrisbarsanti

A freelancer like those of yore, I write and edit for cold hard cash from the highest bidder in the land -- or just the occasional kind word. You can find links to my scrivenings at http://chrisbarsanti.net/.

Reader’s Corner: Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, OmniculturalLeave a comment

Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, hosts of the true-crime podcast My Favorite Murder, are currently bringing their show to thousands of “Murderino” fans around the country. They also have a book publishing at the end of May.

My review of Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered was published in City Pages:

Stay Sexy is a two-handed memoir, with Kilgariff and Hardstark trading off anecdotes and threading them through a survivor’s approach to therapy and how to get by in a world seemingly designed to take advantage of women…

Screening Room: ‘John Wick 3’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment
‘John Wick 3’: Keanu rides a horse in this one (Lionsgate)

The latest of the bonkers John Wick action series hits theaters this weekend. Is it better than Avengers: Endgame? Let me ask you this: is Keanu Reeves one of the Avengers?

My review of John Wick 3: Parabellum is at Slant:

At the end of another knock-down, drag-out pummeling in Chad Stahelski’s John Wick 3: Parabellum, the man with the samurai sword sticking out of his chest says to Keanu Reeves’s John Wick, “That was a pretty good fight, huh?” It’s a throwaway gag, the kind that action directors like to use for a breather after a particularly bruising melee. But it also comes off as something of a gloat—one of a few signs in the film that stuntman turned director Stahelski, for better and worse, is content to coast on a winning formula…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Film - NewLeave a comment
Lily Colins and Zac Efron in ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’ (Netflix)

Taking a break from true-crime documentaries (the Paradise Lost trilogy, among others), Joe Berlinger directed a narrative adaptation of Elizabeth Kendell’s book The Phantom Prince, about her relationship with the serial killer Ted Bundy.

My review of Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, running now on Netflix, was published at Eyes Wide Open:

Of all the serial killers who entered the lexicon of American culture over the past half-century, Ted Bundy, who confessed to over two-dozen murders committed in the 1970s and was executed in 1989, remains something of a standout. The likes of the Zodiac Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, or Dennis Rader (aka the BTK) have shocked for many reasons, most particularly their depravity and ability to elude capture. Bundy, or at least the legend of him, followed a different trajectory…

Here’s the trailer:

Nota Bene: Joy Division

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Nota BeneLeave a comment

Last month in the Los Angeles Times, Henry Rollins published a beautiful appreciation of Jon Savage’s brilliant new oral history of Joy Division: This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else. He included this description of the band’s music, which sums it up better than just about anyone else ever has:

Joy Division’s music doesn’t “rock” in the classic sense as much as shudder, roar and convulse. The songs are readings of temperature, light and lack of light. They walk silently for hours on city streets and return alone to small rooms with full ashtrays and no messages on the machine. It’s a fantastically difficult question to answer: Why do you like Joy Division? The more dedicated the listener, the more likely you’ll get an inhaled breath held for a few seconds, an exhale and a shrug…

Now go listen to Closer about 10 times and you will see what Hank means.

Writer’s Desk: Deadlines Can Be Your Friend

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment
Grantland Rice, deadline writer par excellence

James Parker in The Atlantic, reviewing a collection of great sports writers, noted that sometimes being rushed isn’t a bad thing for getting good material:

We’re all on deadline, of course, at all times and in all places. The last judgment, as Kafka pointed out, “is a summary court in perpetual session.” But a print deadline—the galloping clock, the smell of the editor—is a particular concentration of mortal tension. The brain on deadline does whatever it can: It improvises, it compresses, it contrives, it uses the language and the ideas that are at hand. Inspiration comes or it doesn’t. Here the writer is an athlete—performing under pressure and, if he or she is good, delivering on demand.

Writer’s Desk: See and Tell, Don’t Define

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment


Legendary roots record producer T. Bone Burnett (O Brother, Where Art Thou? among many many others) was on Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Broken Record recently. During a sprawling conversation about music, recording, and the genesis of art, Burnett mused on the following:

All really that artists do is, we’re going down a road and we mark things. We say, ‘At this day I was at this place and I saw this thing and it was beautiful. So I’m going to mark this so that maybe you don’t miss it when you’re going by.’ That’s the real journey of an artist.

He also noted:

Once you define a thing, you lose it.

So there you have it. Write about what you see. Describe a beautiful thing so that it is not forgotten.

But whatever you do, don’t try and explain it.

Screening Room: ‘Non-Fiction’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - New, Film-ForeignLeave a comment

In Non-Fiction, the newest movie from Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria), a clutch of Parisian intellectuals have affairs, drink wine, and talk about the state of publishing and reading in the modern era. One of them is Juliette Binoche, who always makes things better.

My review is at PopMatters:

“Fewer readers, more books.” “I reject this materialistic society.” “These are narcissistic times.” Those are just a few of the cheery bon mots being lobbed around in the opening minutes of Olivier Assayas’s argumentative but thin wannabe literary salon of a movie…

Writer’s Desk: Be More Than a Writer

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

There are people who have known all their lives that they wanted to be a writer. That’s a lot of us, to some degree. Then they tend to face that chasm between the want and the real. Is it a book deal? Getting an agent? Self-publishing and hoping a publishing house notices it? Being one of those strange tables at the publishing convention selling just one book that everyone stays away from?

The comparison between filmmaking and writing isn’t exact, of course. The former is far more collaborative and way more expensive. But filmmaker Mark Duplass made a worthwhile point when he said this:

It’s really hard, and particularly hard for screenwriters, because nobody wants to read your script. It just sucks. Until you’ve made something, until you’ve proven yourself, you’re basically a nuisance to everyone that you’re trying to get your script to, so you have to find a way to make yourself valuable. I know the first response is, “Well, I’m not a director, and I’m not an actor. I’m just a writer.” And my basic response is, “Then you’re going to be stuck.” I’m sorry, if that’s the way you think about it, you’re kind of going to go nowhere…

Don’t be afraid to be a nuisance. Get out there. Bring your book everywhere. Show it to anybody who will glance. Do what you have to do.

Unfortunately, being a writer takes more than writing.

Nota Bene: Twitter, Neo-Nazis, and the GOP

On By chrisbarsantiIn Nota Bene, politicsLeave a comment

In March of this year, Twitter had an all-hands meeting at which an employee asked why the company can’t do as good a job of keeping white supremacist material off the site as they have done with ISIS propaganda?

According to Motherboard, another employee provided a simple explanation:

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said…

The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued…

Screening Room: ‘In the Intense Now’

On By chrisbarsantiIn DVD - Film, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

In Joao Moreira Salles’ beautifully wrought documentary, In the Intense Now, an impressionistic flow of amateur footage captures the joy and despair of the revolutionary movements of the 1960s. It’s an incredible trip.

My review is at PopMatters:

The movie’s first half (“Back to the Factory”) starts with the street battles that ripped through Paris in May 1968. As far as Salles tries to explain it, narrating with a sonorous moodiness and marveling wonder, the protests were a sudden flaring crucible in which all the ferment of the Sixties burned white-hot over a few short weeks…

Here is the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: If You Cannot Sleep…

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Writing1 Comment
Leonard Cohen, 2008 (Rama)

Sometime in the 1960s, Leonard Cohen inscribed one of his early poems (or at least the title) on the wall of a cafe in Montreal.

“Marita, Please Find Me, I Am Almost 30” is a beautiful, heartsick piece that threads the love of creation through a desolate sadness. In other words, it expresses precisely the type of temperament that people normally ascribe to melodramatic artistic types.

But take note of this:

but when I couldn’t sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me

and just try not feeling and seeing yourself in that moment of joyful, rending creation.

Writer’s Desk: Quality First, Money Second

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Gay Talese, 2006 (David Shankbone)

Gay Talese is a great reporter. There are not many of those. He was also a great storyteller—which is not an art that even all great reporters can ever master.

So in the middle of a delightful Men’s Journal interview (sample quote: on how he handles aging? “I go out every goddamn night of the week. Every night. And I order a martini every goddamn night of the week”) Talese explains what he learned from his father about making money as a writer:

I’m the only son of a very prideful tailor. He didn’t make a lot of money, but boy, he took pride in the suits he made. He once told me, “Son, when you look for a job, never ask what it pays.” Instead, he said, master the job, because if you become really good at what you do, the money will come. Conventional wisdom will tell you differently: Hustle, get an agent, ask for a lot, and settle for less. I never did that. And although I wasn’t a tailor, I wrote like one. I cared about every stitch and every button, and I wanted my work to hold up, fit well, and to last. Good work is never easily done…

Be good first, and the money will follow.

Usually.

Screening Room: ‘Woman at War’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-ForeignLeave a comment

In the new Icelandic movie Woman at War, a Reykjavik choir director wages a secret one-person eco-sabotage campaign against the forces of polluting industrialization, taking down one power line at a time with her trusty bow.

Woman at War is playing now. My review is at PopMatters:

This is a movie where the line between real and unreal is as porous as a Greek comedy, so a little bit of tweaking from [director Benedikt] Erlingsson and his co-writer Olafur Egilsson isn’t unwelcome if it gives the heroine some more time on the loose…

Nota Bene: ‘Ethics’ as Fear Tactic

On By chrisbarsantiIn Nota Bene, Publishing / Media, WritingLeave a comment

A so-called “Ethics in Journalism” bill introduced in the Georgia state legislature proposes the creation of a board that would establish a “canon” of journalism ethics and sanction any journalists who broke them.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review:

The bill would also grant interview subjects the right to request any photographs, audio, and video recordings taken by a journalist, ­­free of charge and at any time in the reporting process. Reporters that fail to respond in a timely manner would face civil penalties.

What kind of penalties?

While the bill would compel journalists to turn over records to interview subjects freely and for free, Georgia’s legislature is exempt from the state’s Open Records Act. Those state agencies that must comply with record requests can charge fees to access public documents, and response times for such requests can run longer than the three days afforded to journalists under Welch’s bill. Once those three days elapse, the bill stipulates, journalists would be penalized $100 per day.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted:

The measure was sponsored by Rep. Andy Welch, R-McDonough, a lawyer who has expressed frustration with what he saw as bias from a TV reporter who asked him questions about legislation recently…

Writer’s Desk: Go Deep and Go True, But Make it Good

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment
Tom Waits, 2008 (ntoper)

Back in 2001, J. T. LeRoy was the literary world’s mysterious enfant terrible (The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things). That was not long before the transgressive little gutterpunk Bukowski facade was exposed in the most fascinating literary hoax since, well, just about ever.

Before that happened, though, Vanity Fair had Tom Waits interview the person then calling themselves LeRoy. A couple things jumped out of that exchange. First, this:

Tom Waits: The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. It cheapens and degrades the human experience, when it should inspire and elevate. You are an exception.

J. T. LeRoy: Wow, thanks. One thing I realized is that to just have merely suffered isn’t enough…. [I was given] a book by this guy who had been in prison and writing about his experiences. He had a really horrible life, but it was so horribly written that I just didn’t care.

Your experience matters, as does that you’ve just heard about, but if you can’t write about it in a way that makes anyone attention, it will never be noticed.

Make the pain count.