The Full Clip #2

Time for another romp through my recent reads. That’s more than enough alliteration for now - On with the Linky Goodness!

I've recently finished reading Nick Cohen’s You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. (For the record: Whilst I’m not entirely sold on a few of the specifics Cohen cites in the book to support his arguments, I do fundamentally agree with absolutely all of his broader points). The book is dedicated to the late Christopher Hitchens. So I was particularly interested to trip over this piece at The Spectator by Cohen on the way Hitchens, his legacy and his reputation are being trashed by his former publisher Verso.

Here’s a small fragment of the article, but click through and read the whole thing. “The publishing house has done something I have not seen since the passing of communism: denounced its dead author for his ideological deviations. It recruited one Richard Seymour, a Marxist Leninist hack, to produce Unhitched. (Geddit?) Among his many, many other sins, Seymour accuses his Verso colleague of being a ‘terrible liar’, ‘career-minded’, a ‘power fetishist’, ‘a cliché’ an ‘ouvrierist’ and, worst of all, an apostate who abandoned ‘the left’ to support the West’s wars against al-Qa’eda and Saddam Hussein.” 

The great cinematographer Christopher Doyle gives a blistering must-read two-part interview to BLOUIN ARTINFO. The first part can be found here, but where he really cuts loose is in the second part here, tearing into the current parlous state of cinematography and the Academy Awards, with particular venom set aside for Life of Pi and Lincoln. Sit back and luxuriate in the glorious invective.

“She's brown sugar and spice, but if you don't treat her nice she'll put you on ice!”. “A chick with drive who don't take no jive!” She’s Pam Grier! I love Pam Grier. I really, really love Pam Grier. Especially Foxy Brown and Coffy. And Scream Blacula Scream. And, of course, Jackie Brown. Hell, I love Original Gangstas too.

Thanks to the recent career retrospective at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center (Foxy: The Complete Pam Grier), there’s a terrific career overview by Wesley Morris over at Grantland, and a report back from the event by Will McKinley at his blog Cinematically Insane. Go forth and dig deep into the life and work of “The Baddest One-Chick Hit-Squad that ever hit town!”

The most devastatingly powerful piece of writing to come out recently as we pass the ten year anniversary of the Iraq War is this open letter to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney by the dying war veteran Tomas Young: “You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.”

Finally, The Telegraph publishes a wonderful obituary for gentleman thief and renowned cat burglar Peter Scott: “The people I burgled got rich by greed and skulduggery. They indulged in the mechanics of ostentation — they deserved me and I deserved them. If I rob Ivana Trump, it is just a meeting of two different kinds of degeneracy on a dark rooftop.”