I felt transported and in a kind of dream long before I found a place where I thought I might rest my head long enough to fall asleep, until I was shifted again by what seemed to be the constantly drifting bags of laundry. Sleep would not come right away, a defining experience of life at sea. Added to the queasy motion of the ocean, the heat, and the noise, was a fearsome apparition that Walt had warned me about.
Henry James said, “This vast grey, smoky, extraordinary bourgeois place seems to offer in a ceaseless mild soft rain, no interest and no feature whatever.” The Missouri Historical Society, for their part, has nothing tagged in their online collection for “Henry James.” Touché, maître.
Joel Meyerowitz gives a sort of history of America from mid-century to post-9-11. He frames this, as he sits speaking to the camera, with his own experiences on “the street,” illustrated by film footage (it is unclear if it is his) and stills that he shot.
As our national landscape becomes consumed and reshaped by hundreds of lawsuits, appeals, and judgements, Dickens’s ’Bleak House‘ reminds us of the grotesqueries that will be born as a result, but also of the life that survives and waits for us all outside the courtroom.
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.