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Steve Erickson

Steve Erickson has contributed to The New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone and Los Angeles. He teaches at CalArts, and his new novel is These Dreams of You (Europa Editions).

Recent Articles

"Blue Jasmine" Another Black Mark

Woody Allen's new movie is the latest evidence of how superficial he is—and how his humor and New York sensibility have lured critics and filmgoers into overlooking his shallowness.

Steve EricksonAug 21, 2013
AP Images/Andrew Medichini
AP Images/Andrew Medichini T he new movie, Blue Jasmine, has been so wildly embraced by critics, while being so replete with its writer-director’s worst tendencies, that it provides the best example in years of Woody Allen’s status as America’s most overrated filmmaker. At the center of the picture is the calculatedly neurotic performance by the otherwise fine actress Cate Blanchett, who exhausts our patience within five minutes and, for having done so, has emerged as a front runner for the Academy Award; her Jasmine is the stranger next to you on a plane who never shuts up about herself and commandeers your attention without a clue or care that you might have a life too, since she decided long before she laid eyes on you that you exist for no reason but to enable her or advance her interests or, if need be, save her. She’s certainly not somebody in whose company you want to spend an hour and a half, even with a movie screen between you. Admirers of Blue Jasmine have characterized the...

Have We No Shame?

From Weiner to Filner to Zimmerman and beyond, public embarrassment for wrongs done seems to no longer exist.

Steve EricksonAug 02, 2013
AP Images/Frank Franklin II
AP Images/Frank Franklin II S hame peaked when Nathaniel Hawthorne slapped Hester Prynne with that scarlet A a couple hundred years ago, and it’s been going out of fashion ever since. To a certain extent, good riddance; for most of the last few thousand years of Judeo-Christian morality, public shame has been more oppressive than moral, the judgment of a tyranny of collectively held values rather than an expression of values worth being held. In an age, however, when privacy becomes more obsolete, due not only to the state monitoring our lives as in the recent NSA scandal but also to our communal acquiescence of privacy, shame becomes obsolete: A jury’s verdict notwithstanding, there’s no indication whatsoever that George Zimmerman feels the slightest twinge of remorse let alone shame over shooting to death an unarmed teenager; and what Paula Deen fights for isn’t redemption from the shame of exposing herself as a racist but rather the resurrection of her career, and maybe some...

Vacant Beauty, Boredom, and The Bling Ring

With her latest film, Sophia Coppola emerges as successor to Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, master of disaffection and alienation. 

Steve EricksonJul 19, 2013
AP Images/Matt Sayles
AP Images/Matt Sayles Next month my 15-year-old son, Miles, starts Calabasas High, which lies wedged between the palaces of the community for which the school is named and Topanga Canyon where we live, with its erstwhile bohemians and aging hippies of whom I would probably be regarded as one or both. My niece went to the same high school and I remember some years ago driving her to the fiefdom of an 11 th -grade classmate who had to himself the guest house which adjoined his parents’ mansion and was bigger than any home I’ve lived in. One of the Menendez Brothers went to Calabasas High. Sometimes I worry Miles will wonder what the hell he’s doing at this school and other times I dread he’ll fit right in. Calabasas was where the true-life blingleaders of Sofia Coppola’s new The Bling Ring went to school before they were expelled. This exile appears to have sealed the kids’ view of themselves as outsiders while further igniting their hunger for an insider’s privilege, wealth, and any...

When Justice Is Blind and Deaf

Steve EricksonJul 15, 2013
AP Images/Matt Smith
AP Images/Matt Smith I f justice is a conspiracy between moral logic and the law, then the revelation of the 36 hours following the George Zimmerman verdict is just how complete justice’s failure has been. The shambling closing statement at the trial last Thursday by attorney Bernie de la Rionda was a testament to how fully the state was seduced—with only occasional bulletins from some larger perspective by fellow prosecutor John Guy—into allowing the terms of the contest to be defined by Zimmerman’s counsel, Second City-wannabe Don West and Mark O’Mara, who was his own greatest competition in the sweepstakes for who could make the proceedings’ most flabbergasting comment. After telling the apparently beguiled jury that his client wasn’t accountable for a single moment of the events of February 26, 2012, that led to the death of teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, O’Mara declared at Saturday night’s press conference that had the ethnicities of defendant and victim been...

A Supreme Court Darkly

Steve EricksonJun 26, 2013
AP Images
The Supreme Court decision yesterday that gutted the Voting Rights Act is potentially the most profound since Brown v. Board of Education . It’s more important than Roe v. Wade, Bush v. Gore , or the judgment last year that upheld the Affordable Care Act, because it denies the federal government the power, and state governments the obligation, to enforce democracy in any sense that anyone understands the word. In particular yesterday’s decision overturns nearly half a century’s guarantee of democracy for those Americans who had been denied that guarantee since the Republic’s founding. Within hours of the decision, at least four states that already had a history of vote suppression began introducing bills in their legislatures favoring more punitive voter-identification laws, fewer polling places in minority districts, and shorter hours in which to exercise the right that a democracy allegedly holds most sacrosanct. The court’s judicial action yesterday was created from bad faith and...

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