Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published by “David Yearsley”

Boxing Anthems: Bred to Kill

Though the singing of the American national anthem at sporting events retains vestigial trappings of patriotism, the real point of the exercise is entertainment, the more violent the better. If the anthem is a ritual,…

Heavy Weather

In Upstate New York the long winter, even harsher than last, has been washed away by torrential rains. This morning at the Ithaca Falls the muddy floodwaters have risen to the walls of the wide…

The Thematics of Spring Break

Ithaca, New York. — Patches of snow cling to the muddy earth in the city’s picturesque nineteenth-century cemetery just. In the nearby gorge the creek builds momentum ever hour as the thaw gathers force. Just beyond…

The Gusts of Globalization

Last month the novelist, screenwriter, and CounterPunch contributor Clancy Sigal, whose most recent book is the vital Hemingway Lives!, sent me the following vignette, a history lesson in the nearly unbreakable union between music and…

Scoring Pynchon

The baroque density of Thomas Pynchon’s novels for half-a-century has dissuaded filmmakers from trying to turn any of them into movies. Paul Thomas Anderson’s valiant—or perhaps just plain crazy—cinematic confrontation with Inherent Vice is the…

-