You Say You Want a Revolution: On One Battle After Another and Pynchon’s Vineland

There is a buzz in the air. Electricity skitters across telephone wires, rubber sheaths stretched from pole to pole, drooping above rooftops. Signals ping between satellites and television antennas. Microwaves zap frozen dinners. Static has become the incessant white noise in the nation’s collective head. Later that autumn, “Miami Vice” will premiere on NBC, broadcasting a world of pastels, cops, cocaine, and excess onto the Tubes in every household. Brewing over that sweet Northern California summer — like the bulbous belly of a helicopter skimming the crests of evergreens, its blades whirring and shearing the air — is the presidential election.

A World Beyond Words: On Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow

A century ago, all Hollywood knew was silent films. People flocked to the cinemas. Dressed in gowns and tuxes, they treated a night at the movies like a night at the opera. Of course, they had nothing to which to compare it. Perhaps to our bleary, overstimulated eyes, the silent film is as much a quaint relic as the rotary phone or a children’s toy fashioned out of sticks. To the moviegoer of 1925, though, going to the theater to see static photographs transformed into moving images must have seemed as mystical as the thought of flying to the moon. Recently, I experienced a form of this magic for myself with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I wanted to watch it out of obligation.