Memories of Standing Rock, Five Years Later: Part One
An eyewitness account of the end of the engrossing first act of the Standing Rock movement.
February 28, 2022
More by John Griswold
The Very Modern Fatalism of ‘You Can See Everything’
Audiences might ask, what do those three hours “do”? The answer may be: to portray the helpless, confused feeling of disbelief at our not-knowing in a world where enormous, supra-state power is wielded by gangsters, weirdos, grifters, criminals, and haters, whose choices weaken our societies and make our lives worse.
“Loser Back Home” is Having a Good Trip
Loser Back Home (LBH), who prefers to remain pseudonymous, is traveling through China right now. He has made some 31 social media videos—which began with the series title, “Day [9, 11, 18, 28, 62, etc.] of Not Understanding Anything in China”—as he has passed through, eg, Ganzhou, Ningming, Wuhan, Yueyang, Shaoshan, Chongqing, Chengdu, the Three Gorges area, Zhang Zhou, and other places, including non-Chinese cities Bangkok and Vientiane.
Roald Dahl, Hidden Auteur for ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’
“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” is by turns charming, troubling, funny, dark, romantic, nonsensical, and weird. More than many other movies, it continues to inspire questions about its layers of inventiveness, even though its premise—that specific inputs cannot explain magical output—is in the news every morning now.
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At the Intersection of Faith, Certainty, and Pain
I did not understand how this faith community could have such unshaken “certainty” about the world. Especially a certainty that does not make sense to me. I felt curious about it.
Visiting the Farm of the Rainmaker on a Hot Day
I had come to understand St. Louis through its divisions, through the Delmar Divide and the strange geography of abundance and deprivation that I had stumbled into on that bus ride years earlier. But food made the division feel different.
The Restorative Noise of Doing It Yourself at The Sinkhole
Located on Broadway in St. Louis’s historic Carondelet neighborhood, the venue has become something of a billowing steam vent in the city’s punk, hardcore, and metal scenes. A bastion to the do-it-yourself ethos long embraced by the subcultures of underground music, The Sinkhole boasts a single room, one bar, and a ceiling as low as its overhead.