Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson
Stephen Michael Erickson, pen name Steve Erickson, is an American novelist, essayist and critic. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and is considered an important representative of the Avantpop movement...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 April 1950
CountryUnited States of America
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For thousands of years, we've insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.
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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.
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The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative - a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see - is unacceptable.
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Notwithstanding the likes of 'All the President's Men' in the 1970s or HBO's recent 'The Newsroom,' film and TV have always loved to hate the press.
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From our house we see the Northern Lights quite a bit. But this was really something.
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'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner.
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A modern fascination with the fantastic seems to come along every couple of generations, usually at a point when we're future saturated.
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David Cronenberg's 'Maps to the Stars' is a Hollywood monster movie in which Hollywood is the monster.
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Escapism always has its place, but when movies connect to other things around us and suggest implications that haven't been considered before, that's a dividend, too, even when our love of movies becomes complicated as a result.
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As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.
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Quentin Tarantino is my 15-year-old son's favorite director, and by that I mean no condescension to either Tarantino or my 15-year-old son.
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Inevitably, considerations of God in what otherwise intend to be mass entertainments come down to the same thing they come down to in any context, which is a consideration of humanity.
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Scarlett Johansson has a smile she tries to suppress in every movie she makes. She's been trying to keep a straight face since she appeared with Bill Murray 11 years ago in her breakthrough, 'Lost in Translation.'
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The system is not broken. Clearly there need to be some guidelines, but I don't think the approach these bills are taking is going to solve them.