I recently watched 2 documentaries featuring actor William Shatner, and his long and varied career in acting and other arts. They were The Captains And William Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet.

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  The Captains is a 2011 film directed by Shatner himself, wherein he serves… Read full post »

  Just a week or two before AMC’s hit 1960s era soap opera, Mad Men, started its 6^th season, its 5^th season was finally released to stream on Netflix. While still a good show, in comparison to most of the dreck that fills the several hundred channels of relentless ‘content’ dri/… Read full post »

  I went to sleep one afternoon (I usually work overnights), being informed that film critic Roger Ebert’s cancer had returned, and woke up that evening to learn that the man had just died. That day, April 4^th of 2013, is now almost a month gone, and in the interim, some/… Read full post »

Film Reviews Of Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies Of Wrestling; Blood On The Flat Track: The Rise Of The Rat City Roller Girls; and Brutal Beauty: Tales Of The Rose City Rollers

  I recently streamed three Netflix documentary films that dealt with females in dubious… Read full post »

Reviews Of Joni Mitchell: Woman Of Heart and Mind And Glenn Tilbrook: One For The Road

  One might think that if one did a documentary on a subject that was good, that the resulting documentary would, likewise, be good, or better. But, this is not usually the case. And watching… Read full post »

 Film Reviews Of Trudell; The Eyes Of Tammy Faye; Mario’s Story, And Inside Deep Throat

  I recently watched four documentaries involving criminal scandals of assorted varieties, and each film had pros and cons. The four documentaries under examination are Trudell; The Eyes Of Tammy F… Read full post »

  Recently, film critic Roger Ebert, who has a distressing habit of 3-4 times per year, swallowing his own foot on his Chicago Sun-Times blog, posted a piece titled Books Do Furnish A Mind, wherein he bemoaned the state of reading in our republic, and pinned the blame on everything other/… Read full post »

  Not long ago a reader of my website let me know of a 2008 essay from The Kenyon Review, simply titled No. Its writer is a career Academic named Brian Doyle, whose CV is gratuitously displayed below the article:

  Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the/… Read full post »

  As an artist, writer, and critic of both, I have had a long involvement with, what for lack of a better term, can be called serial fiction, in all its forms across varied media. As a young child, I read comic books, which, as the successor to comic strips, were/… Read full post »

DS: I’m pleased that this latest DSI allows me the chance to dialogue with one of the most well known voices in the arts and sciences over the last half century, and a man whose science books and television shows I grew up reading and watching. He is also one of… Read full post »

  The best ever.

  Let those words penetrate. I state them in reference to the titular work under review and, mind you, I have seen every film and telefilm ‘straight’ version of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, plus almost every humorous take on i/… Read full post »

DS: This seventh DSI is the first with a writer primarily known for essays and criticism, rather than non-fiction, fiction and poetry—although he has written both forms of writing.   Most readers, in fact, will likely know Phillip Lopate less from his words found in book form and more/… Read full post »

Reviews Of Casino Jack And The United States Of Money, The Fall Of Fujimori, And The War On Democracy

Copyright © by Dan Schneider

  It’s odd how often one finds oneself watching a string of documentary films on related subjects. Such was the case, recently,… Read full post »

  If I had the money and time to be self-employed, or live off of my own writing, I might have the time to indulge in all the partaking of art I am proffered. From countless small time publishers offering me free copies- print and cyber- of their latest releases, to… Read full post »

  Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 quasi-sci fi novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (named after the trajectory of German V-2 rockets), is not remotely a good novel, and, in places, the 300,000+ word book is a horrible novel, on a par with David Foster Wallace’s ridiculously bad sci fi novel Infi… Read full post »

Reviews Of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man; Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey; Transcendent Man; Limelight; And Lenny Bruce: Without Tears

Copyright © by Dan Schneider

  I recently watched a run of five biographical documentaries on Netflix streaming video that were about, well, assorted wa… Read full post »

  Having read Jonathan Franzen’s melodramatic 2001 novel, The Corrections, after having recently read Postmodern tripe by William Vollmann, Thomas Pynchon, and so-called Postmodern-cum-classic prose by Don DeLillo, I wondered how in the hell anyone could think that this book was good, much… Read full post »

  Having heard the hype, for years, about Don DeLillo’s long 1997 novel, Underworld, and its being a Postmodern ‘masterpiece,’ I was thinking the work would be something in the unreadably puerile vein of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, perhaps involving parodies of… Read full post »

DS: This is the sixth DSI, and we begin querying perhaps the most well known paleontologist in the nation, John R. Horner, better known to the public via his books and PBS appearances as Jack Horner, Dinosaur Hunter. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed, especially since you are a noted globetrotter… Read full post »

Indy Novels: Thoughts On The Conjure Man, by Peter Damian Bellis and Fiction (or The Unreliable Narrator) by Ara 13

Copyright © by Dan Schneider

  I recently read two novels, unpublished by major houses, from two writers who share commonalities, in that neither one’s skills… Read full post »

 The Dan Schneider Interview 5: James A. Emanuel

An Introduction to ‘The Man’

  This is the first time I am writing a brief Introduction to one of my interviews. This is because, of the first five interviewees: novelist Charles Johnson, philosopher Daniel Dennett, novel… Read full post »

Reviews Of Fed Up!; Food Matters; Food, Inc.; The Future Of Food; Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead; And Killer At Large: Why Obesity Is America’s Greatest Threat

Copyright © by Dan Schneider

  I recently watched six documentaries on Netflix detailing the nature and causes of the… Read full post »

 Book Review of Expelled From Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader

  Fans of David Foster Wallace, relax! Your fair haired (and still dead) boy is still the most terrible, overpraised, overhyped, PoMo, omnibustial critic’s darling of a hack writer out there. Having read Expelled From Ed… Read full post »

  Northern Exposure meets The Sopranos!

  This sentence was uttered at some time during the pitch for Netflix’s first foray into original television programming, and the result is a pretty good first season of a Mafia comedy (not dramady) called Lilyhammer. The premise is that a New… Read full post »

Reviews Of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?; Cave Of Forgotten Dreams; And Into The Abyss

  I recently streamed and watched three recent films by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog. The first was a fictive film- My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?- which, despite my… Read full post »