Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison - each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

Memory runs by its own itinerary, departing and arriving at stations of the past on its own schedule.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

Nothing is more linear than a street; nothing has a more fixed beginning, middle, and end.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

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.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

Among the gorges and ravines that hang on Los Angeles's shoulders like a necklace, Topanga - nestled in the cleavage of the Santa Monica Mountains - is the most singular of ornaments.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey - it's unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

By the nature of cinema and how it literalizes what we envision, movies can have difficulty replicating that connection we make with a classic book.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

If Marxist theory dictates that the personal is always political, the rebuttal of both 'The Americans' and 'House of Cards' is that the political is always personal: the sum total of our collective needs and desires, vows and betrayals.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

The '80s convergence of comics' new adult sensibility with the movies' advancing technology was bound to catch the attention of even slow-on-the-uptake Hollywood, and this particularly was true when 'Watchmen' and 'The Dark Knight Returns' became phenomena.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

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.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, 'Bird,' was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood's potential as a filmmaker.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

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.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

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.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

There's no rule that we have to like the characters movies are about.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

The witch-hunting McCarthy era found Hollywood's view of the press growing bleaker along with the decade's view of everything else.

Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson

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.