by J. M. Tyree “Facts just twist the truth around…” -Talking Heads During the run-up to the referendum on Britain’s relationship with the European Union, I noticed a persistent commercial for SlimFast weight-loss shakes being broadcast on the non-BBC channels. A sultry voice suggested: “Have a go, ladies, and see what you can do.” That’s…

Ben Walters (BW) and J. M. Tyree (JMT) write about movies. Together, they wrote a critical appreciation of The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute’s Film Classics series, and they also have co-written reviews of No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading for Sight & Sound. They discussed this year’s crop of…

Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann for The Owls site. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Editor's Note: These two writers responded to the same image but interpreted the text of the tag differently, one reading it as “we live to…

A Page from the Nightbook By Tomas Tranströmer One night in May I stepped ashorethrough a cool moonlightwhere the grass and flowers were graybut smelled green. I drifted the slopein the colorblind nightwhile white stonessignaled to the moon. In a perioda few minutes longand fifty-eight years wide. And behind mebeyond the lead-shimmering waterlay the other…

Ben Walters and J. M. Tyree chat about film for The Owls site. Together, they wrote the BFI Film Classics book about The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute, and they’ve co-written reviews of No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading for Sight & Sound. This month, they discussed Oliver Stone’s Wall…

Verizon's street poster for Inception Ben Walters (BW) & J. M. Tyree (JMT) have been talking about movies together since 1995, often amicably. They co-wrote a critical appreciation of The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute’s Film Classics book series. They shared notes – via email, chat, and document sharing – on Christopher Nolan's…

Cinematographer Frederick Schroeder photographs Los Angeles at night. Schroeder's full series, Night Drive, can be viewed here at Flickr. Untitled L.A. at Night Elevator View * Frederick Schroeder is a cinematographer living in Los Angeles. At the 2007 Sundance Film Festival he was nominated for Best Cinematography for his work on the film Four Sheets…

So various magazines are doing their Best Films of 2009 features – Time’s Richard Corliss leads with…The Princess and the Frog. Others have more ambitious lists of the Best Films of the Decade. Paste magazine suggests City of God, while Reverse Shot lists Children of Men amongst others, and The Onion A.V. Club picks Eternal…

By Alan Koenig George “Cousin Georgie” Mayer, the last living member of my family to fight in WWII, died earlier this summer. In February of 1942, at the age of eighteen, he was drafted and spent the entire war fighting in the Pacific theater under General Douglas MacArthur. Georgie saw continuous action — except for…

Surely the American public supports the Hollywood writers in their labor struggles and fervently hopes that the writers’ strike be made permanent. Writing is work, and work is a dignified contribution to society. Making someone write for CBS’s drama Cane is an inhumane labor practice and I hope this strike puts an end to it…

MVP Mike Lowell and the Boston Red Sox poured down hurt on the Colorado Rockies in the wretched World Series that ended in last night’s mercy killing Game 4 Sweep. Outside of Red Sox Nation, it was surely one of the dullest of Series in recent memory, the sum total of high drama amounting to…

Were you paying attention when CBS broadcast the American Film Institute’s Tenth Annual “100 Years, 100 Movies,” a list of the Top 100 American Movies Ever Made? If you missed it or the ensuing critical flap, the two lists are side by side here at the Wikipedia. Part of the idea was to compare how…

Thank god, the lawyers of Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are appealing the decision of a London court that Dan Brown did not plagiarize their book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, for his blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code. 2007 begins to look so much less drab when I consider the spectacle of this ongoing legal…

Given all the remarkable occurrences of the last five years, it may seem trivial to dwell on the emergence of fiction about September 11. Why not dwell instead on reality, which is so much more outlandish, tragic, and compelling these days, and whose catastrophes seem to have accelerated recently, so that ordinary life has begun…

Scott Esposito, author of the excellent literary web log Conversational Reading, has spread the word that the next volume of William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series of novels might take on the subject of Chief Joseph: Vollmann fans will be giddy to hear…that he’s shortly to begin work on the next dream in the Seven…

What is it with these writers who feel the need to make up significant portions of their “true life” stories? Why do they think they’re going to get away with it (they never do), and why does the literary world feign surprise with each new scandal? At least the much-feted youthful phenom J. T. Leroy…

The only real surprise about William T. Vollmann winning the 2005 National Book Award for Europe Central was that merit was rewarded. In literature as in life this is not always the case. I have been reading Vollmann since my college days in the mid-1990s, when a love affair with a Canadian caused me to…

When Cardinal Ratzinger was elevated to Pope, my standard joke to relieve the tension in liberal company involved pointing out the fact that the title of Ratzinger’s memoirs, Milestones, was exactly the same as the title of the terrorist primer of the Egyptian radical Islamist Sayyid Qutb, who Paul Berman has called “the philosopher of…

‘Literary critic James Wood called him the “demented magus of the sentence”; John Walsh suspected him of genius, writing: “He can outgun virtually any writer in England.”‘ Why then, if this Guardian profile/interview rings true, don’t more Americans know who Iain Sinclair is? His new novel, Dining on Stones, isn’t yet available in the States,…

I was thrown into a quandary by a remark in the most recent Editorial of the Wilson Quarterly: “The Web, for all its marvels, hasn’t yet provided a home for the kind of focused and sustained dialogue that smaller magazines create.” This comment struck me as both curious and characteristic of a certain residual attitude…