I have always loved my library. I have kept it with me, growing with me, since adolescence, through marriages and divorces, through changes in occupation from student to steelworker, from truck driver to college professor, and moved it from San Diego to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to Cincinnati, and finally to New York City.
Baseball is our national pastime, steeped in the bucolic idyll of rural America. But it is also a deeply conservative social and economic institution. Peter Dreier and Robert Elias trace these divisions in the companion volumes “Baseball Rebels” and “Major League Rebels,” telling the story of individuals who sought to challenge the way in which the game is played and administered.
“I Was Alive Here Once” contains many different types of ghosts in many different stories, fables, and fairy tales, from many different cultures. Sometimes, the world we know is the ghost in the story; the aftermath of war, the wreckage of environmental destruction, lingers in the background of tales driven by the supernatural. Other times, the ghosts blend into our reality, and the supernatural takes a backseat, with ghosts that hardly even know that they are ghosts.
Certain narratives travel more easily. Certain aesthetics are more readily absorbed into festival circuits that reward particular kinds of storytelling. The slow, observational film that gestures toward universality. The politically charged narrative that renders its context legible to an external audience. These are not the only films being made, but they are often the ones that circulate most visibly beyond their point of origin.
When you walk into the Saint Louis Art Museum’s new exhibit—Ancient Splendor: Rome in the Time of Trajan—the emperor himself greets you. His right hand is raised, index finger lifted: he is about to speak. The commanding air comes naturally to him; he rose through the army, suffering hardship alongside…
The new debut record by American Pirates of Bloomington, Indiana, “What a Friend,” artfully blends so many different kinds of folk music that it comes across as an anthology or a variety show, yet with kindred themes and a unifying sound.
I asked a friend which of two things she thought true: Are our lives narratives? Or are they many quick stories/events/incidents that pop up, one damn thing after another, which are tied together only by the meanings we assign?
There are films easily ruined by spoiler details, and then there are films that sound almost like a joke when spoilers are revealed. ‘Sirāt,’ whose title comes from the Arabic meaning “way,” or “path,” or the perilous connection between paradise and hell, is both.
Some of us need to be in a certain place, or with certain kinds of people, or in a certain emotional climate....
Saint Louis Art Museum’s Art in Bloom, now in its twentieth year, is the museum’s most popular event, a long weekend of activities centering around the pairing of specific works of art in the galleries with flower arrangements, which reimagine them, by mostly professional floral designers and garden club members.