Author Archives: David Sadighian

When pressed to list the most lurid cultural phenomenon of the decade — this is scene, after all — I made the usual rounds: reality television (too obvious); celebrity sex tapes (too pillaged as a genre); American Apparel (too personal); Miley Cyrus (too damning); hipsters (too hipster). Indeed, it’s difficult to write about our latter-day »

BEIJING — Closely guarding an answer sheet and a half-eaten cheeseburger, Katie Planey ’09 cranes her neck as if to lift above the bar din — European accents discussing European football, Chinese mouths garbling “mojito” — to hear what’s next: “All right, kids,” an American accent says, “Question seven is ‘Name the northernmost province in »

Aside from volleying dialectics about Werner Herzog and auditing classes on aesthetic theory for fun, film studies major Nicholas Collura ’07 has an additional senior year pursuit: directing a film. “The Soul of Genius” will explore the existential parameters of life in 06520 — the ontological weight of “Yale, Yalies, and the meaning of life,” »

Deep in the plastic heart of midtown Manhattan, the Roseland Ballroom seemed a curious location for live performances by Pitchfork darlings like TV on the Radio. Outside the venue, shifting 20-somethings smoked cheap cigarettes and adjusted their eyeliner. As “event press,” we immediately bypass the crowd — wearing laminated event passes with shameless joy — »

Rest assured — the rumors that the young dauphine dons a pair of Converse are entirely untrue. However, the other glaring anachronisms that have launched critics into skepticism and hipsters into swooning reverie are entirely present: the New Order soundtrack, the “Us Weekly” gossip and even the egregiously contemporary dialogue. Clearly, this film should be »

Among juggernauts like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the dazzlingly austere MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art often suffers the cruel fate of dismissal. And foolish dilettantes always have their reasons: “I find American art to be so common”; “The Whitney? It’s lesser Guggenheim”; “Oh, isn’t that next to Chanel?” Yet this hulking, »

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The most curious thing about any conversation with David Lynch is inarguably his voice. While one might imagine a kind of Hannibal Lector bite, instead Lynch is completely benign, if not charming. Propped beneath a nasally voice, his words are thoughtfully crafted and delivered with kind decorum. He sounds like an intercepted 1957 radio ad »

Fortunately for the cause of world peace, Ashley Judd can’t speak Dutch. Yet even more unfortunate, perhaps, is that her cinematic archetype — i.e. the bedraggled, three quarter-pretty heroine in a half-bad thriller — is not lost in translation. Such is the case in Erik Van Looy’s “The Memory of a Killer,” which mangles an »

With even a hushed mention of Kurt Cobain, every flannel-swathed college kid heaves a thick sigh. His iconic presence on MTV — half-hidden under disheveled blonde hair and cardigan sweaters — is the stuff of cultural history. Now available at Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters, his angst and dissent have been marketed (successfully) by the »

Other than a gummy pair of shower flip-flops, few objects obtain such iconic dorm status as the cartoon DVD box set. You’ve seen its shiny box on renovated fireplace sills, watched its shiny disks on glowing laptop screens, and used it on Friday nights to pacify your Yale party-scene ennui. If it weren’t for that »

For someone so seemingly unpretentious, Bill Murray accepts the role of paternal antihero with devastating ease. Remember when he was alienated by Tokyo’s techno-haze in “Lost in Translation”? Or when he served as the axis of tragedy in Wes Anderson’s trilogy of quirk? He’s the pock-marked face that’s launched a thousand dorm posters. His most »