Email Author Michael Fox

2008 Stories by Michael Fox

• Pull Back the Curtain

  published August 20, 2008

  The lunatic is on the grass. Or in this case, asphalt and concrete. The identity of the acid-test pioneer who first paired Dark Side of the... More >>

• Altered States

  published July 30, 2008

  The groundbreaking painter, writer, and performance artist Brion Gysin was, above all, a seeker. A close friend of William Burroughs, Gysin... More >>

• Exquisite Corpses

  published July 23, 2008

  At the beginning of the decade — and the millennium, not coincidentally — a local graphic artist dropped a pile of cash on a thousand... More >>

• Native L.A.

  published July 23, 2008

  Los Angeles has always been a town of schisms and divisions. The movie stars and real estate developers bask in the bright lights, while the... More >>

• Swiss Engineering

  published July 16, 2008

  The system devised to project Yves Netzhammer’s video installation Furniture of Proportions is an elegant work of art in its own... More >>

• Puttin’ on the Mitz

  published July 16, 2008

  In the late ‘60s, when the gulf between the entertainment establishment (think Bob Hope) and the counterculture (In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,... More >>

• Project Yourself

  published July 9, 2008

  The days are long gone when a geeky goofball like Kevin Smith could propel himself from a bedroom crammed with comic books to a million-dollar... More >>

• Rated X-static

  published July 2, 2008

  You know you’re a real San Franciscan when the term “deviant sex” barely ratchets your blood pressure. By this late date in this... More >>

• Mute Witnesses

  published July 2, 2008

  The myth still persists in some circles that the silent film era was a bastion of primitivism, a tedious mime show of bathetic sentimentality and... More >>

• Not a Hard Cel

  published June 25, 2008

  There’s a lot more to Mike Judge than the mind numbing, rude-boy antics of Beavis and Butt-Head led us to believe. The guy has brains,... More >>

• Waking Dream

  published June 18, 2008

  The demarcation between fiction and life — between stories and experience — grows fuzzier every day. Consider the groaning shelf of fake... More >>

• American Chopper

  published June 18, 2008

  In the carnivalesque early days of movie exhibition, a locomotive steaming toward the camera was sufficient to send patrons stampeding to the back... More >>

• Queer Movie Marathon

  published June 11, 2008

  Michael Lumpkin sings with the swans. Today, tomorrow, and throughout the entire run of the 32nd annual San Francisco International LGBT Film... More >>

• Space Oddity

  published June 11, 2008

  Half a century on, it’s impossible to grasp the full impact of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launch in the fall of 1957. Sure, the Cold War... More >>

• Khush It Real Good

  published June 11, 2008

  Today’s word, for all the vocabulary-expanders in the crowd, is khush. It means “ecstatic pleasure” in Urdu, as well as... More >>

• No Haneke-Panky

  published June 11, 2008

  While the provincial Austrian town of Neustadt sleeps through another colorless night at the end of the '50s, a faceless vandal smashes the... More >>

• Minority Report

  published June 4, 2008

  It’s not easy being a minority group and launching a film festival in a town as packed as this one is with high-profile, well-funded,... More >>

• Boyz (and Girlz) ‘n the ‘Hood

  published May 28, 2008

  School’s out and it’s Kids Korner at the movies for the next three months, as Hollywood floods the market with a summer harvest of CGI... More >>

• If ... Only

  published May 21, 2008

  Brit bad boy Malcolm McDowell didn't have his poster thumb-tacked to as many bedroom walls as James Dean or Marlon Brando did, but only because he... More >>

• Loving Nico

  published May 14, 2008

  In a perfect world, the revival of Philippe Garrel's 1991 pinnacle J'entends plus la guitare (I Don't Hear the Guitar Anymore) would... More >>

• Flight of the Monkeys

  published May 14, 2008

  In their dubious quest to appease every last parent from the Bible Belt to Berkeley, the namby-pambies at Pixar, Disney, and other studios have... More >>

• Street Fighting Woman

  published May 7, 2008

  After four decades of historical reductivism and revisionism, the incendiary student protests of 1968, here and in Europe, have been neatly placed... More >>

• Here's to You, Mr. Robinson

  published April 23, 2008

  Michael Robinson is a poet, a prankster, a moving target. Heralded as one of the rising stars of avant-garde cinema, Robinson is that rare artist... More >>

• Q&A with Medicine for Melancholy Director Barry Jenkins

  published April 23, 2008

  Barry Jenkins' terrific debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy, is an intimate and sociologically astute study of a young... More >>

• Best of the Fest

  published April 23, 2008

  Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia) Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander... More >>