Brooks Riley, director, producer, film critic, editor and screenwriter, is a former Senior Editor of Film Comment magazine and former film critic for WNYC-TV. She has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Boston Phoenix, Opera News and The Washington Post. She also worked for Jean‐Luc Godard as producer at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. She was Executive Producer on a number of films, including Mee-Shee the Water Giant, Puckoon, and Führer Ex. She has directed 10 opera productions for TV and DVD, including Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung from the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar and the Israeli Opera Festival’s Aida in Masada. Email: brooks.r [at] gmx.de
by Brooks Riley In or around 1970: It was one of those humid hot nights in New York. At a party on someone’s brownstone roof, I was hawking my theory of how the world would end, to a couple of contemporaries I’d just met. It went like this: We would never be able to save…
by Brooks Riley Click to enlarge. As I hover over my life in cyberspace, I look down at the various trails emanating from me that find their way across the globe to multiple destinations, known and unknown, whether or not they were ever intended to travel that far. Interconnectivity has increased exponentially since 2009 when…
by Brooks Riley We didn’t want a second cat. That said, we got a second cat, succumbing to the desperate pleas of a friend with two litters to give away. By the time we capitulated, she was the only kitten left. If there were an antonym for ‘runt’, it would have applied to Sperl, as…
by Brooks Riley You can’t take it with you. That’s what they always tell you about possessions. When you die, everything you own will be left behind: Good-bye, beloved steel chair; farewell, feline; adieu, artichoke; bye-bye books, and so forth. All those objects, great and small, animate or inanimate, will exert their protracted existence on…
by Brooks Riley It is difficult to talk about metaphors without talking in metaphors: Metaphors are birds, around us all the time, but unnoticed unless we take the time to look at them. Or, metaphors are apples on the tree of life, the fruits of our search for meaning. You get the idea. Here’s a…
by Brooks Riley I, Kitsch At particularly difficult periods in my life, I study my cat. I’m not a biologist or an anthropomorphologist (okay, maybe I am), but I do occasionally like to read about animal behavior and its human interpreters and interpretations. Much research work examines the intelligence of animals based on tool-usage or…
by Brooks Riley I have to confess to being a reader of Huffington Post’s Living section, a Lourdes for lovers of self-help lit: a bloated site offering problem-solving, self-improving, happiness-inducing, health-enhancing, sleep-promoting, fat-melting, age-dropping, toxin-flushing, confidence-boosting, success-guaranteeing, quick-fix, net-bite, how-to advice for a seemingly endless array of real or imagined shortcomings, most of which, sadly,…
by Brooks Riley Is German humor an oxymoron? Someone said that it was. It might have been Jay Leno, it might have been someone else. It could have been many people, all clutching a cliché as worn out as an old shoe, and one that never really corresponded to reality. That Germans have humor also…
by Brooks Riley We gave them ‘okay’, they gave us ‘Angst‘ (Did they ever!). We gave them ‘cool’, they gave us ‘kaputt‘. We gave them ‘laptop’, they gave us ‘Weltschmerz‘ (Thanks for that.). We gave them back ‘hamburger’, they gave us ‘Frankfurter‘. We gave them ‘showtime’, they gave us ‘Schadenfreude‘ (just what we needed). We…
by Brooks Riley Albrecht Dürer’s “Melencolia I” For years I lived in the Kunstareal, an area of Munich surrounded by museums, great museums, the kind that people travel thousands of miles to visit—the Lenbachgalerie with its Blue Rider painters, the Alte Pinakothek with its Dürers, Brueghels, Rubens, the Neue Pinakothek with its 19th century European…