Manny Farber wrote like he ran with the Beatniks, smoking, drinking and bopping to jazz rhythms. In Farber on Film, we get the straight, the uncut, the complete writings of Farber on film.
Farber wrote scores of film reviews for The Nation, Time, The New Republic and other publications. But his reviews rarely fit into the “first this, then that, and I liked it because” box that most reviewers cram themselves into. Farber mused on the beauty of images, confronted actors’ choices, challenged directors, and digressed down rarely trod paths in order to introduce pertinent impertinences and relevant social revelations.
Farber was a self-described champion of “termite art”: he loved eccentric virtuosity rather than “white elephants,” conformist monstrosities that “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.” Termite art, in contrast, is “ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” White elephant art was seamless mass in “pursuit of… continuity” and “harmony,” while termite art participated in the world: it is “an act of observing and being in the world” and
goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, like as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. Read the rest of this entry »
Leonard Bernstein, early mass media star, gave millions of people a long string of sophisticated lessons in music. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Bernstein appeared on all three major television networks many times as brilliant educator and glorious composer, all the while and just off screen he was also a glamorous bon vivant. Bernstein was a man who lived large and looms large still in the musical consciousness of the United States, and the world as well.
Using X-rays to literally delve beneath the surface of this mysterious portrait, 
