In the 2019 documentary ‘Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land,’ directed by Gilad Baram we get to see a photographer with the perfectionism of a master and the patience of a saint. Koudelka has lived a life of discomfort and often danger for his art.
If someone you love dies, there will be nothing more tenderly, heartbreakingly intimate than their oldest pair of sneakers. Shoes that dashed them through rainstorms, won and lost games, bounced with eager impatience, knotted stubborn in airport security lines. They have been stretched and pounded into a shape no manufacturer ever envisioned. They smell of sweat and earth and freedom.
The project is so daft it is touching: an attempt at nothing less than a comprehensive visual catalog of the entire material culture and socio-familial life of the Vietnamese as they were then, an attempt initiated by a young man in the colonizing machinery meant to drag the Vietnamese into a Western conception of modernity.
Some people (though not many) still read the recommendations and restaurant guides that Sauce and Feast put out. And it may be hard to come by in this city, but in the cracks of the journalism industry, readers can still find restaurant criticism… somewhere.
Critics of Coach Prime often accuse him of providing all glitter with no game plan, but in its most decisive moments, Jean-Jacques Taylor’s book holds space for both the intentionality behind Deion Sanders’s decisions and the pomp and circumstance when the lights are bright.
A preacherly ambition propels Bono’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, as the book chronicles U2’s forty-odd-year career, and the book’s impact hinges on your openness to Bono’s expansiveness.
Spring, after all, is the supposed season of renewal after the darkness of winter. In fact, for millions of people who straddle the cause-and-effect of depression, allergies, and autoimmune disorders, it is the season of spiritual and physical struggle.
There is much of interest in the documentary “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse” about technique, layout, framing, visual style, and the burden of guilt in storytelling, because these things cannot do enough.
“Tallow.” Say it carefully even once or twice and we notice instantly its phonetic advantage over the word “lard,” which sounds suspiciously like “lord” but falls just one vowel short of such esteem because no one would like to think of using God’s name in vain, much less as something we might cook with.
Harvard, which has America’s largest university endowment, of at least $53 billion, might be seen as best-suited to defend its autonomy from federal demands, but then that is one of the very reasons it is a primary target.