The Cultural Gutter

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"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde

The Daughter of Dawn

The 1920 film, Daughter of Dawn has been restored. Daughter of Dawn is set before European settlers landed in the Americas and features a cast of 300 Kiowa and Comanche actors, including the children of Quanah Parker, White and Wandada Parker, and also includes footage of the Tipi with Battle Pictures, an important part of [...]

Loving the Alien: Superman and Masculinity

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Since alex, Chris and I decided to write about masculinity this month, I’ve been thinking about Superman. Actually, I’ve been thinking and rethinking Superman almost as long as I’ve been writing for The Cultural Gutter. I began really thinking about him while watching Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. I’ve spent most of my life—and [...]

USA Today Interviews Beverly Jenkins

Author Beverly Jenkins talks with USA Today about writing romance rooted in 19th Century African-American history as well as her new projects and favorite authors. “I got a bit of push back because publishers didn’t seem to know what to make of my story. It was based on the 19th-century, all-black townships of Kansas and [...]

The Learning Tree Revisited

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In this companion piece to his retrospective of Gordon Parks’ career, Guest Star Robert Mitchell looks at Parks’ The Learning Tree and interviews lead actor, Kyle Johnson. 1968 was a tumultuous year in American history. A year marred by wide spread violence that would see Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated in Memphis and Bobby Kennedy [...]

  • Of Note Elsewhere

    NPR’s Monkey See blog shares a look at Adventure Time. “Adventure Time insists on emotional honesty.” (via @profmdwhite)

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    Recent shenanigans The Cultural Gutter has been involved in: The lost Drive-In Mob Movie S.P.E.C.T.R.E. on Monster Island; a transcript of the Shaitani Dracula tweetalong organized by The Mysterious Order of the Skeleton Suit; and the ongoing Twitter game/story, “Tonight On Mad Men.”

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    At Vern Reviews The Films Of Cinema, Outlaw Vern offers “one Seagalologist’s perspective on the ‘vulgar auteurism’ debate”: “The practitioners are trying to bring recognition to artists who they think are marginalized, but they’re accidentally creating a ranking of ‘vulgar auteur’ beneath ‘actual auteur.’ And that also shines a spotlight on the idea’s most glaring weakness: even the most establishment of the critical establishment have always worshipped directors who were at some point considered lowbrow–Hitchcock, Fuller, Peckinpah, DePalma.”

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    Pornokitsch finishes determining essential epic fantasy, with statistics, graphs and lists of their selections. Nice to see Homer in there.

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    David Simon shares the best deleted scene from the fifth season of The Wire. (via @pornokitsch)

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    “In a column just as true today as it was at the time of its writing, this reprint from the February 1998 issue of Game Developer magazine by game designer J.C. Herz blasts the industry conservatism and the retreading of familiar ideas.” Read it at Gamasutra.

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