Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson
Stephen Michael Erickson, pen name Steve Erickson, is an American novelist, essayist and critic. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and is considered an important representative of the Avantpop movement...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 April 1950
CountryUnited States of America
bergman collection critic dvds fellow hundred includes seven six
I own one movie by fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman, because I have to. You can't be a movie critic with a collection of six or seven hundred DVDs that includes everything from 'Tokyo Story' to 'Poison Ivy: The New Seduction' and not have a Bergman movie.
creative critical culture gates genres guardians linger movies science since transcend tv war
In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.
band beach biggest boys cold early matching summer utopian
In their matching candy-stripe shirts, the Beach Boys were America's biggest band of the early '60s, transmitting utopian bulletins of summer without end to a cold and overcast nation.
clooney fifth george guessing inside instantly minutes screaming star ten tv whom
Inside every TV star is a movie star screaming to get out, and Donna Frenzel, with whom I'm guessing you're not instantly familiar, made George Clooney a movie star once and for all in the first ten minutes of his fifth feature, 1998's 'Out of Sight.'
tarantino yardstick
In retrospect, 'Pulp Fiction' isn't just the template for everything Tarantino has done but the yardstick by which everything else he does is measured one way or another.
alone families family hard points watch
I don't know how many modern families watch 'Modern Family,' but then one of the points of 'Modern Family' is that it's hard to tell what a modern family is anymore, let alone what it does.
less memory movies precise profoundly rather trailing
Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water's surface, less precise but more profoundly true.
hopefully hour love otherwise people shock spend watching whom
Hopefully it doesn't come as too much of a shock that artists we love watching or listening to for an hour or two aren't always people with whom we otherwise would want to spend 20 minutes.
acclaim almost art forms gate gathering measured obsessive overrated popular purely sensation shows success sweeping tv unlike
'Homeland' was a sensation out of the gate in 2011, gathering acclaim and sweeping up Emmys, and the reason such shows are so overrated is because, unlike with other forms of popular art, success in TV is measured almost purely by how obsessive we become.
answers behind constantly possible replaced resolution since spend time usual
'Homeland' is necessarily open-ended since the idea behind television is to spend as much time as possible resolving as little as possible, with a story's usual need for resolution replaced by an unrelenting urgency that always defers answers and constantly postpones closure.
If 'Fargo' is about anything, it's American madness.
god intend mass otherwise
Inevitably, considerations of God in what otherwise intend to be mass entertainments come down to the same thing they come down to in any context, which is a consideration of humanity.
behalf currency lives notoriety politics
In journalism, as in politics, other people's lives are a currency to be bartered on behalf of notoriety and influence.
best danish director eight films impossible joan movies original seven watch
In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 'The Passion of Joan of Arc,' one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once.