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Philip MartinArkansas Online |
BOSSIER CITY -- The Horseshoe Casino has become part of an annual ritual. For about a month each summer, my mother trades the humidity and heat of...
Bacardi Black Rum does what an entry-level spirit is supposed to do. It’s trying to become the dependable house bottle that earns its place on the...
Sixty years after ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ Bob Dylan’s masterpiece is harder to recognize as revolutionary precisely because it changed the language...
Hearing is not the same as listening.
Argument is part of the pleasure of baseball. No game has ever been more thoroughly measured. We know launch angles, spin rates, exit velocities,...
A few recent baseball books arriving this month approach the game from entirely different directions, yet they seem animated by the same conviction...
We were walking home west along the River Trail in North Little Rock after Lucinda Williams closed out the Arkansas Folklife Festival a couple of...
Netflix’s documentary on Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert reveals a complicated story that isn’t really about tennis.
For years critics treated self-published books as easy rejects. Lately, a handful of independent authors have reminded me that the best reason to...
A funny weird thing happened to me a couple of weeks ago.
This week's releases range from Margo Price's politically charged folk-country and Kacey Musgraves' introspective songwriting to Keith Urban's...
Today’s best television keeps returning to film noir — not for its shadows and cigarette smoke, but because those old stories still understand the...
When the 33rd Iowa Infantry reached Helena in January 1863, Andrew F. Sperry recalled that "some of the boys profanely denominated it...
Back in the days when people sent letters, I kept a correspondence file.
BENTONVILLE -- Every city is a palimpsest.
AMC’s ‘Dark Winds’ borrows the visual language of the classic Western while replacing myth with community and spectacle with lived experience.
The hardest stories are so ordinary that no one thinks to notice them.
Democrat-Gazette online
The point isn’t to identify one movie that towers above all the others. We no longer inhabit a movie culture dominated by a handful of obvious...
For more than 30 years I've carried business cards that read: "Philip Martin, hack writer & plagiarist."
Two new histories revisit moments when Americans thought they could see what came next — a mercury boom in southwest Arkansas and a nation’s grand...
If you watch a lot of British crime dramas, you eventually begin to suspect that the United Kingdom is covered by an enormous security camera system.
James McMurtry calls himself a working musician, a beer salesman. His songs suggest something stranger: a writer who hears people so completely that...
Democrat-Gazette online
May 26 marked the centennial of Miles Davis' birth, an anniversary he almost certainly would have hated.
While critics and editors debate lists and categories and her proper placement in the American canon, she will spend an evening standing on a stage in...
I ran into a musician friend I hadn't seen in a while the other evening; we were walking out of a library event as he was walking in. He looked...
Thomas W. Laqueur’s new book “The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History” argues that those apparently incidental animals are doing far more work than...
Father's Day always falls on a Sunday, which means I could recycle an old column and take the day off. Change a date, smooth out a paragraph, fix an...
I knew my cards were worth something when I gave them away.
Like an artist sketching what surrounds an object, Zinzi Clemmons reveals freedom by tracing its absence, while Isaiah Berlin explains why its...
Democrat-Gazette online
A Wednesday night at White Water Tavern, two Arkansas songwriters and an unexpected reminder that ordinary lives, ordinary disappointments and...
The longer one looks, the more this painting resembles an argument about the ways of seeing.
A lawyer friend reports from the ongoing dystopia: His 97-year-old mother-in-law's bank has merged with another bank. This would ordinarily be one of...
One of the first things we learn in school is that it isn't enough to "know something."
The books that have actually impressed me this season look, at first glance, like they belong at different parties. One tackles translating...
On the third Friday evening of every month, Karen and I harness two impatient dogs and walk to the Argenta Branch of the William F. Laman Public...
Democrat-Gazette online
From Robert Mitchum to Robert De Niro to Javier Bardem, “Cape Fear” keeps returning because Max Cady changes less than the country he haunts.
The first basketball player who amazed me was Elgin Baylor.
The traditional American version of the story treats the famine primarily as a natural disaster. The reality is considerably more complicated.
People say America is trapped in nostalgia, though that diagnosis seems to be lazy cultural shorthand that sounds persuasive until you start poking...
One of my earliest memories is an embroidered patch on the sleeve of my father's flight suit.
There was a period, roughly from "The Black Dahlia" through "American Tabloid," when reading James Ellroy felt like discovering that somebody had...
Frank Lloyd Wright taught Americans to see buildings. Keith Haring believed art required no secret handshake. Their shared faith in ordinary curiosity...
Democrat-Gazette online
One of the occupational hazards of music criticism is the tendency to overvalue the new. Every Friday arrives carrying another stack of releases...
What makes “The Shootist” endure is its fascination with the distance between the stories people tell about a man and the man himself.
As America approaches its 250th birthday next month, the country seems gripped by a familiar form of existential anxiety.
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