Craig K. Comstock

Wood Allen Pushes on to New Territory

By Craig K. Comstock

Review of Woody Allen's Without Feathers, published in the Oakland Tribune

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A couple of summers ago in a Paris café I was trying to make out the latest book by Michael Foucault, on sexuality. So as not to appear chic, I hid it inside an old copy of Woody Allen’s Without Feathers, which I kept for just such purposes. A lovely woman at the next table, tanned, slim, mischief in her eyes, asked me, “Aimez-vous Voody?”

 

Did I love him? Well, I was about to explain that it was more a matter of brief but intense infatuations across a crowded rue, but she was apparently thinking of another Woody.

 

“I love so much his folk-singing,” she informed me. “His land is your land, of course; it’s not my land; but his critique of late capitalism penetrates his own neo-romantic style to deconstruct the very hopes he cannot help raising.”

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Should I have risked offending her by asking whether she meant Woody Guthrie? Or should I have confessed that under cover of Without Feathers I was actually reading her own compatriot Foucault? I chanced he latter. “Foucault,” she said scornfully, her hazel eyes shifting from moss to acorn. “He was last year”….