Brendan Slocumb’s goal is to be the “Stephen King of musical mysteries.” In the last three years, he has published three mystery novels with Penguin Random House: The Violin Conspiracy (2022), Symphony of Secrets (2023), and The Dark Maestro (forthcoming in May). The protagonists of all three novels are classical musicians, and all three plots […]
Tag: Books & Film
Posted inEssay
Heart of Glass
In “Maria,” a sad, nosy, seedy film in which Maria Callas dies once again, banalities appear dressed as aphorisms. “Happiness never produced a beautiful melody,” she tells Mandrax, her journalist-cum-hallucinogen. When her obliging footman Ferruccio asks what she has taken—the film obsesses about Callas’s pills—she floats back a response: “I took liberties all my life. […]
Posted inPlaylist
A David Lynch Playlist
David Keith Lynch died on January 16, days before his 79th birthday. A polymath best remembered as the director and writer of “Blue Velvet” (1986), “Mulholland Drive” (2001), “Inland Empire” (2006), and (much of) “Twin Peaks” (1990-1991, 2017), few artists can lay claim to his idiosyncratic, inimitable comfort with discomfort in content and form. Lynch […]
Posted inEssay
The Post-Election Hand of Fellowship
In the weeks before the 2024 U.S. election, when my Trump anxiety kept me from sleeping or focusing, the only thing I found solace in was an academic book of musicology. If I had encountered Samantha Ege’s South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene at any other time, I would have […]
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Off-Site Eden
In his dazzling, fragmentary book A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes wrote, “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.” When I first encountered this analogy in my early 20s, I felt somehow relieved. I […]
Posted inEssay
Kafka’s Coloratura
To read Franz Kafka’s last short story “Josephine, the Songstress or The Mouse Folk” is to recognize the reflection better the dirtier the glass. The subject of the story is an artist and the creatures in whose midst she makes her art. Her name is Josephine. She is a singer. Or is she? Josephine’s folk […]
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A Lord Byron Playlist
Back when Twitter was still (somewhat) good, someone by the user name @Swaefastide posted a portrait of Lord Byron, in traditional Albanian costume, with the caption, “I will NEVER apologize for being a wildly successful alpha male,” lampooning the words of Trump-endorsed author Nick Adams. Non-Trump-endorsed author Ryan Ruby took the parody one step further, […]
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The Best Opera Scenes in Film
On film, characters go to the opera house for meetings, espionage, or murder; operas can bring about moments of revelation, connection, or catharsis. They progress the plot or add texture to the lived-in dimensions of the film’s world. But the best uses of opera in film boost something under the surface, and even add additional […]
Posted inPlaylist
An Edward Said Playlist
Edward Said reigned as the poster child for public intellectuals, having made early waves with his breakout 1978 tract, Orientalism. Just a few weeks after the 20th anniversary of his death from leukemia at the age of 67, his name is being invoked again on all sides of the news cycle. His criticism of both […]
Posted inEssay
Abstracting Evil
In 2012, Austrian film director Michael Haneke criticized Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Holocaust drama, “Schindler’s List,” for the way it manipulates its audience. “The idea, the mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question of whether gas or water is going to come out of the showerhead to me is unspeakable,” […]