In this Author's Note, Michael Rubenstein discusses his new book, Pipeline Noir, which revisits Chinatown fifty years after its release, reading the film’s water infrastructure alongside the oil pipelines and energy politics of the 1970s. Moving between Chinatown, The Graduate, Five Easy Pieces, and Mad Max: Fury Road, Rubenstein traces the presence of oil across New Hollywood cinema and argues that Chinatown makes visible a distinctly petromodern way of seeing — what he calls “pipeline noir.”
Joel Duncan turns to Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island to think through life within petromodernity. Centering on “Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen,” Duncan's essay, like his new book (Poetic Drive), treats poetry as a site of attention to entangled, fossil-fueled life, where responsibility and the possibility of change emerge from sustained presence rather than distance.
