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
born career clearly grand ocean older order passing seas surely time whose
'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner.
age antiquity choices families households passed ritual single television time together tv watching
The ritual of families watching TV together passed into antiquity around the time I was my son's age; that was when households tended to have a single television and when the choices of what to watch were manageable.
constant fragments narrative shot time
Moviemaking is a time machine: narrative spliced into fragments and reassembled into a constant present, the end of a story shot before the beginning, which is shot after the middle.
became confess distinct half longer music occupied popular sat strip table territory timeline vicious waiting
For half a century, the Sunset Strip was the asphalt timeline of American popular music. My most distinct memory, from more years ago than I'll confess to, is waiting for a table at the Olde World, which occupied a wedge of territory at Sunset and Holloway Drive, where the daiquiris became more vicious the longer you sat in the sun.
seen time
I know it's the first time I've ever seen one in the daytime.
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.
adored became existed time
When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them.
acted julia meryl roberts senseless time
Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts act themselves senseless in 'August: Osage County,' and by the time they're finished, they've acted their movie senseless, too.
sinatra
In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.
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.
composed gorgeous grotesque imagery knights ladies obscene poison shot south
The beautifully composed imagery of '12 Years a Slave' underscores the savagery of its subject, which is an American South not of knights and ladies but obscene values and a grotesque pageantry, every gorgeous shot of the languid landscape radiating toxicity like a hyperlush blossom that's poison to the touch.
action bad breaks character crime entirely godfather modern war youngest
That godfather of the modern action blockbuster, 'The Godfather,' is entirely character driven, propelled by the transformation of a crime lord's youngest son, who breaks bad when he evolves from white-sheep war hero to blood-soaked inheritor of his father's empire.
clause compel document edited himself including sign thomas wrote
Nothing manifests more persuasively the American contradiction than that the author of the Declaration of Independence, a slave owner, wrote an antislavery clause into the document - as if to compel himself to be better than he was - which then had to be edited out so the Southern states, including Thomas Jefferson's own, would sign it.