Stories by Philip Martin

OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: Tales of Black and unknown bards of long ago O black and unknown bards of long ago,How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?How, in your darkness, did you come to knowThe power and beauty of the minstrel's lyre?— James Weldon Johnso... February 5, 2023

Taciturn old men When I was younger, there were a lot of World War II veterans around.In high school, I worked in a sporting goods store alongside a guy who'd been a platoon leader in the Battle of the Bulge. My b... February 5, 2023

OPINION | ON FILM: ‘Citizen Kane’ taken in context The movie I've watched more than any other would be John Landis' "Animal House."Let me qualify that -- "Animal House" is very likely the movie I've sat through more tim... February 3, 2023

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Consistent productive assets The Baseball Hall of Fame has a mission statement. It means "to preserve the sport's history, honor excellence within the game, and make a connection between the generations of people who enj... January 31, 2023

OPINION | ON BOOKS: ‘Wild Muse’ publication remembrance of Spitzer "Wild Muse: Ozark Nature Poetry" (Cornerstone Press, $19.95 paperback) is another project edited by Phillip Douglas Howerton, an apparently indefatigable professor of English at Missouri Sta... January 29, 2023

CRITICAL MASS: On David Crosby’s death and listening to ghosts There is a scene deep in A.J. Eaton's 2019 documentary "David Crosby: Remember My Name," where the subject, then 78, muses about his former bandmates."I still have friends, but all ... January 29, 2023

The sport that’s most like war People disappoint you all the time, but it's not often that you are genuinely surprised.I wasn't surprised when six people emailed me to stick up for George Santos.But I was surprised when thi... January 29, 2023

OPINION | ON FILM: Top movie lists of the past and present A friend commented that he didn't understand why Stanley Kubrick's Cold War-era black comedy "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964) rarely show... January 27, 2023

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: The killing joke "Never point a firearm at anyone, including yourself. Always cheat the shot by aiming to the right or left of the target character. If asked to point and shoot directly at a living target, consul... January 24, 2023

CRITICAL MASS: Macho man, randy savage — Norman Mailer at 100 "I may as well confess that by Dec. 8 or 9 of 1941, in the 48 hours after Pearl Harbor, while worthy young men were wondering where they could be of aid to the war effort, and practical young men... January 22, 2023

Radical happiness It's been said that we are what we choose to be.There is truth in that, though we must recognize our limitations (and, if possible, make them our strengths). I cannot, at this stage in my career, ... January 22, 2023

Millennial ‘Falcon’: Where did film noir begin? It is never easy to say where anything begins. (You want to argue? Nominate a track as the first rock 'n' roll song ever.) These days Humphrey Bogart begins on television, dryly lisping throug... January 20, 2023

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: The sunshine insurrectionist People do horrible things. There's a spectrum.The guy sitting on the weight bench checking his email is objectively terrible. So are people who trigger your flight or fight instinct by walking up ... January 17, 2023

CRITICAL MASS: Held captive — Stockholm syndrome and television I started watching "Clark," a six-part Swedish true crime series about the life and times of Clark Olofsson, who is something of a folk hero in Scandinavia, on Netflix last week. The show or... January 15, 2023

Two shooters Photography is a mysterious art that, because of its mechanical nature, some tend to dismiss. It is not exactly science and it is certainly not objective. Cameras lie all the time and moments cannot b... January 15, 2023

Gunfighter ballads and trail songs With the revenge movie "The Old Way," Nicolas Cage has finally done a Western; at least he says it's his first.I might have counted "Raising Arizona," the Coen Brothers' se... January 13, 2023

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: To serve man We have seen the terrifying robots.In the Boston Dynamic videos they run and leap and do parkour. They will not be eluded. They will find you. They are quick and indefatigable and merciless. They will... January 10, 2023

CRITICAL MASS: Private Elvis — The King of Rock ’n’ Roll was an original and the primary conduit through which Black style infiltrated the mainstream When he shook it and he rang like silverAnd he shook it and it shined like goldAnd he shook it and he beat that steam drill, babyWell bless my soul— Gillian Welch, "Elvis Presley Blues&quot... January 8, 2023

OPINION | ON BOOKS: Power of unread books — a mountain I aspire to climb Years ago, a photographer visited our house to take pictures of our dogs for some purpose I've completely forgotten.But I do remember her reaction when she walked into our living room and saw our ... January 8, 2023

Damar Hamlin’s heart More than once this week I've heard some say that one of the safest places to have a cardiac episode is in a stadium during a National Football League game.No doubt this is true, seeing how quick ... January 8, 2023

OPINION | ON FILM: When the legend becomes fact … As I wrote last week, with this column we're retiring the "New Movies" rubric and going back to calling this space "OnFilm."It signals a subtle change in direction for this col... January 6, 2023

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Knowing when to quit The other day when it hit five degrees and I was on the side of the house trying to get our water heater to kick on, I was thinking about the only high school golf tournament I ever won.I know, glory ... January 3, 2023

Some unpopular opinions to start the year Let's start off 2023 with a fresh edition of unpopular opinions:• Hold off on swearing George Santos in as a member of Congress until the voters of New York's 3rd congressional district h... January 1, 2023

Bringing back old, classic movies in the future This is the last "New Movies" column.I'm only retiring the name. In 2023 we're going to bring back the old "OnFilm" rubric for the print column, and supplement it most week... December 30, 2022

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Taking inventory People might find this season a time for inventory and self-assessment.This is the last column of the year for me in these pages, and news cycles tend to slow as the year winds down. (At least that&#3... December 27, 2022

OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: Movies in Ordinary Time — a best of and an alternate list of 2022’s Top 10 films There's no best movie, just like there's no best sunset. Subjective judgments derive from all manner of internal calculation, and a lot of the work is done subconsciously. No one is ever wrong... December 25, 2022

Pursuing the spirit The original version of this column ran in 2011.My father would always finish his Christmas shopping early, probably around mid-October. But on Christmas Eve, he'd go out to the stores, to the bus... December 25, 2022

ON FILM Watch Philip Martin’s On Film column at: arkansasonline.com/onfilm1223 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eyWnIOZ-mIs" titl... December 23, 2022

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Chatting with the overlord I'm chatting with "Assistant," a "large language model trained by OpenAI," which is an artificially intelligent program that writes stuff. Like the poem about Leonard Cohen I j... December 20, 2022

OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: A year in books (that I wasn’t able to write about) One of the reasons newspapers -- and other publications -- like to do end-of-year wrap-ups is because they're easy to pull together in a short period of time.Most years I write a year-in-books ess... December 18, 2022

If we make it through December "I don't mean to hate December, it's meant to be the happy time of year."-- Merle HaggardWe don't make a big to-do about the holidays.On the first weekend of December, I climb a ... December 18, 2022

‘Everything’ tops the list of SEFCA members Last week the Southeastern Film Critics Association -- an organization that counts our Keith Garlington, Karen Martin and me as members -- announced that Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's "E... December 16, 2022

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Hello golf They hammed and egged pretty good for a bunch of trick-kneed has-beens.Granted, playing off the forward tees was a boon to three of them who are decades past qualifying for AARP membership, and the yo... December 13, 2022

CRITICAL MASS: Gap year — It’s a long way from 1962; but the music stays with you even if you don’t like it In my digital music library, I have a playlist labeled "country hits of 1962."There are more than 115 songs on this playlist, from artists like Kitty Wells and Bill Anderson and Faron Young.... December 11, 2022

OPINION | ON BOOKS: Race is an illusion — but its ramifications are not It's generally accepted that race is not biological, but a social construct. We've known this for more than 100 years; sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois warned against segregating subjects by racial ... December 11, 2022

The greatest of all time A couple of weeks ago, for the first time in its 70-year history, British magazine Sight and Sound's "Greatest Films of All Time" critics' poll ranked a film directed by a woman as t... December 11, 2022

‘Loudmouth’ In evaluating a movie, it's fair, if not absolutely necessary, to consider the filmmakers' goals and how well the film accomplishes them. Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will"... December 9, 2022

ON FILM Watch Philip Martin’s On Film column at: arkansasonline.com/onfilm129 <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zyu0wfkhdmI" title... December 9, 2022

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Speaking up for Harvey "I wanted to die. It was disgusting. It was humiliating, miserable. I didn't fight. I remember how he was looking in the mirror and he was telling me to look at him."-- Jane Doe No. 1, t... December 6, 2022

OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: The passion of Tár and the morality of artists Todd Field's provocative power study "Tár" opens with a clever scene in which New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik, playing himself, introduces a fabulous woman named Lydia T&aacut... December 4, 2022

Opie on the school steps I'm not of the opinion that we all need to disclose everything all the time.Everybody makes mistakes. And most of us evolve. I think about some things differently than I did 10 or 20 or 50 years a... December 4, 2022

OPINION | REVIEW: ‘Johnny Cash: Redemption of an American Icon’ is a spiritual bio-pic The Nickajack Cave story is familiar to most people who have a personal relationship with Johnny Cash.By "personal relationship," I mean a relationship deeper than what you get by simply smi... December 2, 2022

ON FILM Watch Philip Martin’s On Film column at: arkansasonline.com/onfilm122<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZJ5r6V5J7OU" title=&quot... December 2, 2022

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Our stupid problem I was raised to believe that ignorance is a remediable condition.People who used certain racial epithets, I was told, did so out of insecurity of their own place in society. They were telling on thems... November 29, 2022

OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: When memory wants to speak, movies can really make us listen In his production notes to "The Glass Menagerie," which opened on Broadway in 1945, Tennessee Williams called his work a "memory play," and wrote that as such, it could "be pr... November 27, 2022

OPINION | ON BOOKS: Grinding out some novel ideas with Haruki Murakami and Cormac McCarthy Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto guy whose business model just blew up, said he figured that anyone who ever wrote a book failed. If they had something to say, they should have done it in a six-paragraph... November 27, 2022

Good enough people When you were younger, you might have thought there was a regular order to the world. For this is the way it is explained to us, in history books and fables passed down from one generation to the next... November 27, 2022

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: 11/22/63 One of the things that makes us human is the conviction that we are more than our biologies. It takes a mind of Nietzschean steel to utterly dismiss mystery as the tickling of neurons beneath a cupola... November 22, 2022

OPINION | CRITICAL MASS: Ken Burns’ ‘Our America’ a history in photos "The need to reflect on our history through photography is one that seems ever more urgent."— Sarah Hermanson Meiste, in an essay included in Ken Burns' "Our America: A Photog... November 20, 2022

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Ordinary murderers You probably believe you can pick them out.A writer I know hired a neighborhood kid to do some yard work this summer. He didn't do a great job, but if you want a great job you don't hire some ... November 20, 2022