Shortpacked
If Kevin Smith’s original slacker story Clerks took place in a slightly happier universe, with a larger and more functional friend circle, who worked in a bright toy store instead…
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Rumpus Articles
Porn Pirates 1, Disney Pirates 0
When is porn better than mainstream Hollywood fare? When it’s Digital Playground’s (NSFW) Pirates 2: Stagnetti’s Revenge, billed as the biggest-budget porno ever made. The trailer alone puts it light…
Television, Starring John Cheever and John Updike
This has been a week of exhuming dead writers. First the hallelujahs for the news of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming unfinished novel, now a newly unburied video of Cheever and…
Three Dimensional Tattoos
How many times do you actually feel like you are watching reality, or at least all that you know to be real, shatter? Click this link and you will add…
Bloody Foreigners
The February Rolling Stone has a fun piece by David Browne on a 2,200 LP album library hidden in the White House:
What’s Good for General Motors Was…
…maybe not so great for you. I’m in this week’s New Scientist with a piece on the Cornell-Liberty Mutual Survival Car, and the tremendous resistance safety reforms faced from Detroit…
BITCHCRAFT: Thinking by Numbers
At my knitting group, I sit next to a woman who is doing something so complicated that it makes my eyes and brain and soul hurt just to look at…
The Rumpus Long Interview with Zack Snyder
The interviewer first met Zack Snyder, director of Dawn of the Dead, 300, and Watchmen, in 1977 as 11-year-olds at a summer camp in Maine.
Eric Blair, National Treasure?
Julian Barnes weighs in on three collections of George Orwell’s work— Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, compiled and with an introduction by George Packer; All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays,…
Beautiful Booze Hags
In a flash that’s maybe as much prose poem as it is non-fiction (does it matter?), John Griswold injects us into a scene at the end of a man’s life.…
The Call For Collaboration
It would be nice to think there was another model, one that could inspire a pair of young, edgy writers to walk along lonely railroad tracks, kicking rocks and running…
The Shorty Q & A with Larry Smith
Larry Smith of SMITH Magazine keyed into the popularity and resonance of short, pithy bios even before “tweet” made its way firmly into the vernacular.