Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

Dir. R.W. Fassbinder (1974).
R.W. Fassbinder set out to create stylized melodramas that would appeal to popular taste while criticizing the status quo. Ali “remakes” Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, substituting a North African guest-worker and a 60-year-old German hausfrau for the originals more glamorous, star-crossed, May-December pair Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson.

Sat., June 4, 7:30 p.m., 2011

More:Culture Jane Wyman R.W. Fassbinder Rock Hudson

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Music

Rock in the 1970s: Journey Through the Past

“If anyone had told me in 1969 that George Clinton and Al Green would be two of my three favorite rock and rollers of the ’70s my only response would have been ‘Who?’ Which is why I’m not going to try and foretell the future now.”

by Robert Christgau
Music

Stones & Angels: Viewing the Remains of Altamont

“The Stones hired us to act as security for $500 worth of beer. That Mick Jagger, he used us for dupes.”

by Grover Lewis
Ad Candy

Soundtrack to Watergate Vol. 2: Pirates, Angels, Dinosaurs, Gas Masks — and Ziggy Again

Nixon, a buttoned-down Quaker, was the antithesis of the counterculture that most of the albums trumpeted

by R.C. Baker
Music

A Sid Vicious Story

“I guess she was perfect for him — they could beat each other up every night and nobody’d mind. They had real fights.”

by Lester Bangs
From The Archives

Bill Barr: The “Cover-Up General”

“At the center of the criticism is the chief articulator of Bush’s imperial presidency,” we reported in 1992, “the man who wrote the legal rationale for the Gulf War, the Panama invasion, and the officially sanctioned kidnapping of foreign nationals abroad.”

by Frank Snepp
Neighborhoods

Harlem When It Sizzled

“For contemporary Afro-American professionals and intellectuals, the Harlem of legend is at best a Utopian cultural myth.”

by Greg Tate

Voice Choices

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

by Jim Hoberman

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