A way back

When the world feels brittle, reading a poem can become a radical act.Lately

previous day 3

Philip Martin

Come together, side by side

We like to think of artists as singular geniuses. But often the richest stories emerge when two of them are displayed side by side—when their...

13.10.2025 1

Philip Martin

ONBOOKS | OPINION: The hard grace of Jack Butler

I did not fall into Jack Butler's 1993 novel "Living in Little Rock With Miss Little Rock" easily.

12.10.2025 10

Philip Martin

Performative patriotism cheapens real sacrifice

Democrat-Gazette onlineI grew up with the smell of jet fuel in the air.

12.10.2025 3

Philip Martin

RECORDINGS | OPINION: Rediscovering ‘Buckingham Nicks’ album

The first thing you notice, before the harmonies or the precise lattice of acoustic and electric guitar filigree, is the audacity of the cover: two...

11.10.2025 4

Philip Martin

POPNOTES | OPINION: ‘One Battle After Another’ — joy in the ruins

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film “One Battle After Another” arrives as spectacle and a provocation, an improbable blend of action-movie...

11.10.2025 8

Philip Martin

Ordinary kindness

My dog Savannah loves everyone. Everyone.

08.10.2025 3

Philip Martin

Cultural interpretation is presented in a unique multimedia exhibition at Bentonville.

BENTONVILLE— Sports have always been devotion and delusion, and even after living a large part of life in them, I still don’t know how seriously...

06.10.2025 6

Philip Martin

The end of the affair

On her porch in the thinning dusk, Sunny sensed that hollow stillness you get when the neighbors have gone off to Taos or Greece for a week.

06.10.2025 3

Philip Martin

ONBOOKS | OPINION: Three Arkansas voices, three measures of endurance

Literature at its best is less a single voice than a chorus.

05.10.2025 2

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: AI algorithms equal music as content

The digital revolution was supposed to free us.

05.10.2025 10

Philip Martin

The chill and the silence

Democrat-Gazette onlineA curious thing happens when governments decide they must protect us from ourselves: Liberty contracts, trust evaporates, and...

05.10.2025 7

Philip Martin

FIVE QUESTIONS: Huismans contrast decoration, preservation

Walk into almost any older McDonald's and look at the art.

05.10.2025 20

Philip Martin

RECORDINGS | OPINION: Neighborhood grooves, and big-band swagger, all in week’s listening

These columns aren't surveys of the marketplace so much as dispatches from whatever happens to be on the turntable, in the headphones, or rattling...

04.10.2025 9

Philip Martin

POPNOTES | OPINION: Tulsa noir — chasing corruption in ‘The Lowdown’

Created by Sterlin Harjo, the Seminole/Muscogee filmmaker who gave us “Reservation Dogs,” and fronted by Ethan Hawke, “The Lowdown” barrels...

04.10.2025 6

Philip Martin

GREAT MOVIES | OPINION: ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ — how trash, glam and gay camp crashed the mall

The miracle of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” isn’t that it exists — cinema has always had its curiosities, midnight follies and trash...

03.10.2025 3

Philip Martin

A dangerous time

Once upon a time, hypocrisy was the price you paid to belong to polite society.

01.10.2025 2

Philip Martin

Mourning Margaret

I saw a social media post recently where a man explained why he was shaken by the murder of Charlie Kirk but felt nothing like the same outrage at...

29.09.2025 10

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: John and Yoko — eavesdropping on an unfinished argument

I spend a lot of time listening to music or watching movies from 50 years ago.

29.09.2025 10

Philip Martin

ONBOOKS | OPINION: ‘Dogs’ — circling, then spiraling, in the small-town dark

There were high school nights I never told my mother about.We

28.09.2025 5

Philip Martin

The joyless efficiency of baseball

Democrat-Gazette onlineNostalgia may be a cataract, but baseball really did look better when a workhorse like Bill Hands could throw 300 innings.

28.09.2025 3

Philip Martin

HOME MOVIES | OPINION: ‘Unicorns,’ ‘Coddling’ — romance and anxiety

For years we ran a column called Home Movies -- a place for talking about what was new on DVD, or, later, what had just landed in the digital ether.

27.09.2025 5

Philip Martin

LONG LOOK | OPINION: Dog with guitar — does absurdity tell the story?

I’ve known John Sykes for more than 30 years.

27.09.2025 5

Philip Martin

Cool reflection

"Sadly that is the laziest column that I have ever read written by you.

24.09.2025 10

Philip Martin

Erasure of the human hand

Not long ago, I came across a post by Brooklyn painter Graig Kreindler, whose work I admire. He creates astonishingly detailed oil paintings of...

22.09.2025 5

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: How ‘Mystery Train’ showed me pop songs were maps of America — and that criticism could be art

I learned the truth at 17 ...-- Janis IanFifty years ago, when Greil Marcus published "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music," I was...

22.09.2025 10

Philip Martin

LONG LOOK | OPINION: Jim Marshall’s photo of Cash, inmate outshines color version

BENTONVILLE — There are photographs that slip free of their original contexts and settle in the cultural bloodstream.

22.09.2025 3

Philip Martin

FIVE QUESTIONS: Greil Marcus still in awe of the power of music

When "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music" first rolled out of the station in 1975, it didn't sound like any other book about rock...

22.09.2025 4

Philip Martin

Money for nothing, Bitcoin for bros

Democrat-Gazette onlineForget the techno-babble surrounding cryptocurrency--hashes, mining rigs, cryptography that sound like a graduate seminar in...

21.09.2025 4

Philip Martin

RECORDINGS | OPINION: From Spinal Tap’s gray-haired roar to Sabrina Carpenter’s sly pop and beyond, new records prove music isn’t finished growing older — or stranger

Rock ’n’ roll has never been shy about aging badly, although it usually tries to do it in leather pants.

20.09.2025 9

Philip Martin

PHILIP MARTIN | OPINION: Robert Redford defined by balance between legend and authenticity

I keep circling back to my father when I think about Robert Redford. Not because the two men ever met, but because my father judged actors by whether...

17.09.2025 4

Philip Martin

False comfort

On the morning of Sept. 17, 1862, outside the sleepy town of Sharpsburg, Md.,

17.09.2025 30

Philip Martin

The banality of violence

I posted something on Facebook the other day which led someone to ask me whether it came from being bullied.I

15.09.2025 10

Philip Martin

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: How to not be a hack

Democrat-Gazette onlineThe very idea of compiling a list of "writing rules" is counterintuitive.

14.09.2025 10

Philip Martin

SPIRITS | OPINION: Big Bird in a bottle — something simple and strong

Mellow Corn is the whiskey aisle's yellow punchline.

13.09.2025 3

Philip Martin

POP NOTES | OPINION: ‘Thunder Road’ and the Cost of Escape — Springsteen’s first masterpiece wasn’t a single, but a proposition

"There's nothing like being young and leavin' someplace ..."-- Bruce SpringsteenThe first sound is a breath.

13.09.2025 9

Philip Martin

Self found

I recently lost 131,000 emails. They vanished during an operating system upgrade--Mac OS Tahoe 26.0,

10.09.2025 5

Philip Martin

Three specials ... three truths

Stand-up comedy, at its most potent, works like Samizdat, the underground literature passed hand to hand in the Soviet years, typed and retyped on...

08.09.2025 3

Philip Martin

How bullies prosper

We like to tell ourselves that bullies don't win. We say "hurt people hurt people," as if cruelty is necessarily the product of insecurity or misery....

08.09.2025 4

Philip Martin

FALL PREVIEW | OPINION: Autumn is Hollywood’s serious season

Fall is the grown-up season at the movies — or at least it pretends to be.

07.09.2025 30

Philip Martin

Finishing, nicely

Democrat-Gazette online"Nice guys finish last." We've heard the line 1,000 times, sanded down into a proverb that sounds as old as competition itself.

07.09.2025 4

Philip Martin

POPNOTES | OPINION: Grudges without borders — Jason Morphew’s Arkansas Elegy

Jason Morphew is not exactly a household name in his home state, though he probably ought to be.

06.09.2025 3

Philip Martin

GREAT MOVIES | OPINION: Smoke, song and mirrors — ‘Don’t Look Back’

D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary “Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back” doesn’t explain Bob Dylan so much as trap him in a frame, turning the...

06.09.2025 4

Philip Martin

American captive

Czeslaw Milosz defected from communist Poland in 1951, carrying not just the memory of a ruined country but a diagnosis of how authoritarianism seeps...

03.09.2025 4

Philip Martin

The last movie critic

Michael Phillips is leaving the Chicago Tribune.

01.09.2025 4

Philip Martin

ONBOOKS | OPINION: Contradiction of ‘Baby Hawk’ and ‘Blue 42’

Tom Epperson has always been a writer of contradictions and of conscience.

01.09.2025 10

Philip Martin

LONG LOOK | OPINION: Bull rush — Elaine de Kooning’s painted verb

Elaine de Kooning’s “Standing Bull” (1958) is a work of art that charges at you — soaked in light, saturated with muscular energy and visibly...

01.09.2025 4

Philip Martin

The impossible outfielder

Democrat-Gazette onlineYou can go to baseball games for more than 60 years and, on any given day, still be surprised.

31.08.2025 30

Philip Martin

GREAT MOVIES | OPINION: Clerical terror — Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ turns 40

Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” doesn’t so much begin as stumble awake, like you’ve walked in on someone else’s nightmare at the exact moment it...

30.08.2025 3

Philip Martin

POP NOTES | OPINION: A sprawling new boxed set of Elvis Presley’s 1972–75 rehearsal sessions finds the King still fighting to mean it

In Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) shuffles through her crumbling mansion like a ghost who refuses to...

30.08.2025 10

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A way back

Philip Martin

Come together, side by side

Philip Martin

ONBOOKS | OPINION: The hard grace of Jack Butler

Philip Martin

Performative patriotism cheapens real sacrifice

Philip Martin

RECORDINGS | OPINION: Rediscovering ‘Buckingham Nicks’ album

Philip Martin

POPNOTES | OPINION: ‘One Battle After Another’ — joy in the ruins

Philip Martin

Ordinary kindness

Philip Martin

Cultural interpretation is presented in a unique multimedia exhibition at Bentonville.

Philip Martin

The end of the affair

Philip Martin

ONBOOKS | OPINION: Three Arkansas voices, three measures of endurance

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: AI algorithms equal music as content

Philip Martin

The chill and the silence

Philip Martin

FIVE QUESTIONS: Huismans contrast decoration, preservation

Philip Martin

RECORDINGS | OPINION: Neighborhood grooves, and big-band swagger, all in week’s listening

Philip Martin

POPNOTES | OPINION: Tulsa noir — chasing corruption in ‘The Lowdown’

Philip Martin

GREAT MOVIES | OPINION: ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ — how trash, glam and gay camp crashed the mall

Philip Martin

A dangerous time

Philip Martin

Mourning Margaret

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: John and Yoko — eavesdropping on an unfinished argument

Philip Martin

ONBOOKS | OPINION: ‘Dogs’ — circling, then spiraling, in the small-town dark

Philip Martin

The joyless efficiency of baseball

Philip Martin

HOME MOVIES | OPINION: ‘Unicorns,’ ‘Coddling’ — romance and anxiety

Philip Martin

LONG LOOK | OPINION: Dog with guitar — does absurdity tell the story?

Philip Martin

Cool reflection

Philip Martin

Erasure of the human hand

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: How ‘Mystery Train’ showed me pop songs were maps of America — and that criticism could be art

Philip Martin

LONG LOOK | OPINION: Jim Marshall’s photo of Cash, inmate outshines color version

Philip Martin

FIVE QUESTIONS: Greil Marcus still in awe of the power of music

Philip Martin

Money for nothing, Bitcoin for bros

Philip Martin

RECORDINGS | OPINION: From Spinal Tap’s gray-haired roar to Sabrina Carpenter’s sly pop and beyond, new records prove music isn’t finished growing older — or stranger

Philip Martin

PHILIP MARTIN | OPINION: Robert Redford defined by balance between legend and authenticity

Philip Martin

False comfort

Philip Martin

The banality of violence

Philip Martin

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: How to not be a hack

Philip Martin

SPIRITS | OPINION: Big Bird in a bottle — something simple and strong

Philip Martin

POP NOTES | OPINION: ‘Thunder Road’ and the Cost of Escape — Springsteen’s first masterpiece wasn’t a single, but a proposition

Philip Martin

Self found

Philip Martin

Three specials ... three truths

Philip Martin

How bullies prosper