The new documentary ‘Taking Venice,’ directed by Amei Wallach, tells the story of that intrigue with original footage, recent interviews, some recreations, and a snappy jazz-funk soundtrack à la ‘Ocean’s Eleven.’
Truckloads of paintings and artworks attempt to depict or advocate political and historical events and eras. The Romans constructed arches to commemorate military victories for the foundation and building of empire. Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) rings a collective bell inside our national head every time we…
I knew Lester Bowie had been dead for a long time, and I think I know that dead people do not get up and dance at the funerals of people they have loved. But I never could escape an eerie feeling. I felt that Lester would twirl into the sanctuary behind the Bosman Twins, his signature white coat flowing open, waving his shining trumpet and finally blowing it with the voices of edgy angels.
William H. Gass was, as everyone notes, known more widely as a novelist and essayist than a philosopher, but his literary prose showed analytic philosophy’s interest in language, image, and metaphor, which he made cool.
Flea was always moving. True to his name, he never stood still for long. Indeed, you could say he flitted. He was smiling at you and slapping your back or hugging you, he connected with you, but, it always seemed, briefly.
The reporter was the same height as John Malkovich, and baldheaded, and got a similar pissy look on his face when he was tired. (Malkovich grew up 15 miles from where the reporter grew up.) The reporter felt as if he looked like John Malkovich in that movie where he was walking through the crowd in a station, trying to look normal, but doing it so obviously that Bruce Willis just had to laugh.
Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention again in August 2024, and if one were going to connect city and convention in some essential way as Mailer intended, an updated metaphor would be needed. Forty-five-year-old Norman Mailer would have hated the choice of something “corporate,” for its connotations: intangibility, unaccountability, absence, abstraction, hiddenness, hardly a way to know where the heart even sits.
The best last lines stay with you long after you close the book—some like a welcome sip of fine cognac at the end of a delicious meal, and others, while not neatly wrapping up the story, stirring you to imagine what might happen next.
As soon as you can reach high, grab the shiny doorknob, and toddle outside, you see what your homeworld actually looks like. Odds are, it will be the first thing you draw: a box with a triangle on top, two square eyes to let the sunshine in, a tall door to let your friends in. It is your kangaroo pouch, familiar and comforting when the rest of the world is strange.
In 1976, James Baldwin showed up in Berkeley to visit me and we hung out and had a great time. Although he never mentioned Truman Capote, I am willing to bet that if I had asked him he would have said, “Yeah, I stopped off to see if you were here to see him on my way out of New York.” The fictional truth is a greater truth than any that we have in real life.