Recent stories by Philip Martin
Skills that make dreams
One of the few practical skills I learned in college was how to take photographs and develop film.
I've forgotten a lot of what I used to know; while I still have a nice mirrorless Sony with an array ...
August 27, 2019
CRITICAL MASS: Things to come — ready for the fall movie lineup?
There is nothing to complain about. All I have to do is list these movies that I have not seen and write a couple of lines based on what I've read and heard and can surmise from the details.
[Galler...
August 25, 2019
PHILIP MARTIN: Singing in the shower
I've just turned off the water in the shower at the gym when I hear him scat singing. Sha doob da wah. Sha doob da wah-ee wah.
He has a casual authority with the phrasing; a little lilt, a little paro...
August 25, 2019
The Nightingale
Jennifer Kent's follow-up to her startling debut, 2014's The Babadook, is a dark and brutal revenge drama set in 1825 on the island of Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land) during a conflict call...
August 23, 2019
The Peanut Butter Falcon
So you think you've pegged Shia LaBeouf.
Talented, OK. A little self-impressed and a little too enamored of his image as an enfant terrible.
The Peanut Butter Falcon
87 Cast: Zack Gottsagen, Shia LaBe...
August 23, 2019
PHILIP MARTIN: Our best and worst
"I should like to flee like a wounded hart into Arkansas," Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said near the end of his life.
Meaning that, having been jailed and broken, he felt like retreating into igno...
August 20, 2019
PHILIP MARTIN: Remembering a Morehouse man
C. W. Clendenon was a double doctorate from Morehouse College in Atlanta; he chaired the math department and taught philosophy at Langston, the only historically black college in Oklahoma. We might kn...
August 18, 2019
CRITICAL MASS: What is the intention behind the art?
Art begins with intention.
It is an attempt to express an idea. A cat walking across a piano keyboard does not make art; a human being pounding on one might. The pertinent question to ask is "What do ...
August 18, 2019
PHILIP MARTIN: Death of a Bond villain
"He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."
-- Donald Trump on Jeffrey Epstein in 2002
"Beginning as far ba...
August 13, 2019
CRITICAL MASS: 50 years ago ... Woodstock brought the summer of love, the '60s to a close
"Somebody somewhere is giving out some flat blue acid ..."
-- announcement made from the stage during the 1969 Woodstock Art & Music Festival
It started as a business plan, as an ad in The Wall St...
August 11, 2019