Jackson Arn
By Jackson Arn
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Culture Spike Lee’s Wild, Wonderful World Of Jews
“It’s cheap, I got a good price for you, Mayor Koch, ‘How I’m doing,’ chocolate-egg-cream-drinking, bagel and lox, B’nai B’rith asshole!” Not bad … but what about “neurotic,” “dreidel-spinning,” “self-hating,” and all the rest? Then again, the Korean grocer who hurls anti-Semitic slurs at the camera midway through Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing,” which…
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Culture For Garry Winogrand, All Great Photography Had To Be Jewish
Garry Winogrand was the restless omnivore of photography, the artist who surveyed all of midcentury America and swallowed it whole. In the work he produced between the 50s and the 80s, he embraced everything without ever quite endorsing or prettifying it. He approached his subjects, instead, with a kind of hard-won gusto: a willingness to…
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Music The Astronomical Force And Zen Cool Of Leonard Cohen
The late phase of Leonard Cohen’s career began, like a lot of artistic triumphs, with the desperate need for a quick buck. In 2004, Cohen learned that his manager, Kelley Lynch, had been quietly stealing his money and that he was now, at the age of seventy, virtually penniless. Lynch was ordered to pay 9.5…
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Culture What The New Left Could Learn From The Old Left
Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics by Michael Walzer NYRB Classics, 120 pages, $14.95 Michael Walzer’s “Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics,” published in 1971 and newly reissued by NYRB Classics, may be the least exciting book ever written about taking to the streets. I don’t mean that as an insult,…
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Art For An Art Rebel, Martha Rosler Proves Surprisingly Orthodox
I’m not sure what to make of the title of the Martha Rosler retrospective at the Jewish Museum, “Irrespective.” According to the wall text, it’s supposed to be a portmanteau, “a clever play on terms that lie somewhere between the words ‘retrospective’ and ‘irreverent.’” The exhibition, we’re promised, will be no mere shrine to its…
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Culture Before He Was A Genius, Stanley Kubrick Was A Wunderkind
As I studied the contents of “Through a Different Lens,” the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition of Stanley Kubrick’s early photography, I played a game with myself. I tried to forget that the photographs had been taken by the director who made “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Eyes Wide Shut.” Instead, I…
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Art Mandrakes, Dragons, Jews — And Other Monsters Of Medieval Times
The mandrake is a small, perennial plant that grows in warm Mediterranean climates. Its flowers are a pretty shade of purple, but its roots can be deadly. Pluck a mandrake from the soil and you’ll find a tiny man hanging down underneath the leaves, screaming loudly enough to kill anyone nearby. The only safe way…
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Culture The Melodramatic, Bloated, Indulgent Brilliance of Luchino Visconti
On April 15, 1944, in Rome, Fascist soldiers captured Luchino Visconti di Modrone, the Count of Lonate Pozzolo. Since the late thirties, the Count had been a loyal Communist, sheltering party members in his mansion and even selling family jewels to fund Mussolini’s defeat. As Peter Bondanella explains in “A History of Italian Cinema,” Visconti…
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