Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • The Hairy Ape

    The Hairy Ape

    The first image you see at Eugene O’Neill’s THE HAIRY APE at the Park Avenue Armory are rows and rows of seats, ready to absorb the arriving audience into a yellow, Borg-like mass. The implication is that, once we are seated, the play will redound on us with its expressionistic theme: society as a machine…

  • Nocturnal Animals

    Nocturnal Animals

    NOCTURNAL ANIMALS is a dig through sedimentary layers of style. This is no surprise from designer-cum–director Tom Ford, whose previous film was the brilliant and controlled A Single Man. The excavation starts, during the credits, at the level of outré contemporary art, with a display of flesh that confronts stock ideas of ugliness, then delves…

  • American Honey

    American Honey

    AMERICAN HONEY is as close to guileless as film can be, in its shots, its editing, its acting, its casting. It shakes you awake with its freshness. Sasha Lane, plucked off a beach by the director Andrea Arnold to play the lead, is an instinctive talent whose craft seeps from her bones on its own…

  • Carol

    Carol

    Acting is the art of the inscrutability of the self. If, as Sartre would have it, the other person is unknowable, and, as Grotowski said, “no one can know the mind of the other person,” then it is the actor’s conundrum to know the mind of the person she plays and make him knowable to…

  • From the Earth to the Moon

    From the Earth to the Moon

    He was, when I was growing up, a boy in a normative Middle American family, essential reading, along with Conan Doyle, Tolkien, and a few others. But I have the sense, hoping that I am wrong, that Jules Verne is not, at least in this country, so much read anymore. Part of this is simply…

  • The Iceman Cometh

    The Iceman Cometh

    Brian Dennehy, who plays Larry in the Goodman Theatre’s THE ICEMAN COMETH at BAM, is the sort of actor who gets you imagining in advance what he will be like. Metaphors involving hulking animals form before their time. He will sulk like a defeated bear, howl like a yeti, hang his arms like an ape.…

  • Hopper Drawing

    Hopper Drawing

    There is much greatness in the visual art of the United States, but in the end I always settle on Hopper. I went away from Modern Life, the Whitney Museum of American Art‘s 2013 retrospective, thinking his paintings, which teeter on the line between the beauty of solitude and the pangs of loneliness, to be…

  • Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

    Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

    David Lowery’s AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS is a strong silent type of movie, a Lone Star noir full of the unspoken feelings of decent people and the stoic acceptance of what men and women must do when faced with the consequences of their actions. There is more than a touch of nostalgia about it, of…

  • The Great Gatsby

    The Great Gatsby

    I saw Baz Luhrmann’s THE GREAT GATSBY through 3D glasses, and I would not have seen it any other way. The whimsical unreality of it, the whole cinematic pop-up book of staggered planes and optically induced kinesthetic illusion, translates not only the novel’s style but its thematic essence. Gatsby is a novella of memory, of…

  • On the Road

    On the Road

    Jack Kerouac’s On the Road  was a literary rush when I read it sometime in the 1980s, the perfect expression of a sort of counter-mythology to the mainstream myth of the American Dream. The Dream myth holds that we can do anything we want in this country, choose our professions, attain wealth, and build families,…