Articles by Buzz Poole
January 11, 2013
Graffiti and Glory Days: The Millions Interviews Adam Mansbach 5
The “War on Graffiti” presaged and ushered in zero tolerance policy, prejudicial gang databases, quality of life offenses, epic incarceration — the whole way a generation has experienced law enforcement and personal freedom.
December 22, 2012
A Year in Reading: Buzz Poole 0
Musil wastes no time establishing a scope of ideas that are prescient and read as if written today, fully-realized observations of how commerce and industry render us anonymous cogs in a great global machine that chips away at the individual.
July 5, 2012
Out of the Pool: On Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies 3
What her elegant prose allows to float slowly to the surface with the fluid definition of air bubbles is the fact that because she did not succeed at the Olympic trials she has succeeded in life by learning that life is “complicated, mostly sad, and mostly beautiful.”
May 11, 2012
Portrait of a Nation: Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s The Colonel 1
Dowlatabadi’s nonlinear episodes jump in time and perspective, a puzzle as fragmented whole as when it is in pieces, an appropriate quality for a book about the shattering of individuals and national identity.
February 22, 2012
Fanatic Meets Stalker: Geoff Dyer’s Zona 4
Even if you’ve never given a second thought to quicksand, tried LSD, or watched The Wizard of Oz (Dyer hasn’t), his read of Stalker permits you to square your life with a film that you may or may not know anything about.
January 12, 2012
If You Could Hear A Book, This Is How It Would Look 3
Chromatic documents a segment of today’s music scene by favoring exciting and important visual examples that contribute to a sensory overload that better represents the music than words or notes ever could on their own.