Paul Levinson
Bio
Novels The Silk Code, The Plot To Save Socrates, It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles; LPs Twice Upon A Rhyme & Welcome Up; nonfiction The Soft Edge & Digital McLuhan, translated into 15 languages. Prof, Fordham Univ.
Stories (745)
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Review of 'Narcos: Mexico' 3
I really enjoyed the third and final season of Narcos: Mexico, and regret that there won't be another season, devoted to Chapo. Yeah, I know there have been other series and movies about Chapo, but his story deserves to be done up in the inimitable Narcos way, especially his ingenious escape via tunnels, which (as I've mentioned before ) I've always admired. When I was kid living in the Bronx, I used to think that the best way of escaping police if they were after me was to dig a big tunnel under the Hudson and up to the Catskills. Fortunately, I didn't commit any crimes and they never came after me.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Criminal
Review of 'Invasion' Season One Finale
There's much less talking and no real combat in the Invasion Season One finale up on Apple TV+ today (yes, there will be a second season, the series was renewed two days ago). Our main characters all over the world, still in various stages of profound shock, after what happened last week, struggle to understand what's going on. Much like us, the viewers, on our other side of the screen.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'The End of Eternity' (Soviet, 1987, Konets vechnosti)
I saw a thread on Reddit about a 1987 Soviet adaptation of Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity -- my favorite time travel novel, published in 1955 (which I first read as a kid in 1959) -- and of course I had to see it. Fortunately, it's available free, in two parts, on YouTube.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Futurism
Review of 'The Beatles: Get Back' Part 3
If I had to pick the single best moments in the nearly nine hours of the superb, one-of-a-kind documentary that is Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back, it would be Paul McCartney saying "whew!" smiling, doing a dance, and continuing the concert, after turning and taking note of the robotic cops (or whatever they call them in London) intruding into the Beatles' rooftop performance. The same cops on the ground floor had been threatening arrests and claiming they weren't making threats before they demanded to go up to the roof. Good thing they don't carry guns like the police do here in America.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Beat
Review of 'The Beatles: Get Back' Part 2
A very different kind of feeling and (true) story in Part 2 of Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back documentary. Up from the doldrums, George Harrison is back, Billy Preston joins them, and the sound and the ambience is often heady and exhilarating.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Beat
Review of "The Beatles: Get Back" Part 1
I started watching Get Back with the absolute knowledge that The Beatles were and are one of the best things in my life, and easily THE best thing musically. For the past few years, I've listened to them about as much as to MSNBC on Sirius XM radio, which is to say, any and all the time I'm in the car driving by myself (see The Omnipotent Ear). Their arrival in the United States in 1964 coincided with my first serious girlfriend, Barbara (we met when she came to hear my doo-wop group sing at a Y on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx). By January 1969, the time we see the Beatles in the studio in Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back, I was with Tina, who became my wife. We're still happily married, with wonderful children and grandchildren.
By Paul Levinson4 years ago in Beat
