From Poland to St. Louis with dreams, back to Europe to fight, back to St. Louis to drink, and make shoes, and die. He had no idea his name would live on—let alone make generations of playgoers wince and recoil. The blame for that can be divvied up between Tennessee’s father and one of his lovers.
Coenties Slip. Photo by John Griswold
The feeling comes over me at unexpected times—walking down a street of stone townhomes at dawn, lights in bay windows, stairs and gardens mounded with new snow. Sensing that the skyscraper-as-public-art was designed instead as a taunt and a cashing-in on…
In its planning phase after September 11, One World Trade was commonly called the Freedom Tower in response to the attacks. It was later named, more commercially but just as defiantly, for the old address of the North Tower, though it actually stands on the former site of 6 World Trade Center, also destroyed on 9-11.
Posture, “the position or bearing of the body,” carries information. My slump is insecure, preoccupied, habitual. Kneeling at work was an eagerness for communion with my colleagues. Much as I roll my eyes over liturgical dance (when it is self-conscious and silly) or arms that are stagily lifted to the heavens, something does feel different—wide open and vulnerable—when your arms are lifted high, not crossed over your bosom in self-defense.
August 22 will mark the 120th anniversary of her birth—a good day, if you are a devotee, to mix a martini with Dorothy Parker American Gin (the owner of its New York Distillery exchanged Dorothy Parker vows with his bride at their wedding) or take a tour with Kevin Fitzpatrick, founder of the Dorothy Parker Society.
Bringley’s gift is to make the scholarly approachable—and delightful. In that decade at the Met, he developed a method. Rather than hunt for some extraordinary characteristic highlighted by the experts, he does nothing, just stares, spending those first minutes in a work of art’s presence by absorbing all he can without attaching any initial judgment, and he refuses to worry about what the art-world elite think.
Sixteen months ago I worked as an extra on the third installment of Guardians of the Galaxy movie. It has just been released, and we went to see it opening weekend.
For Millstone, an engineer of buildings, highways, intelligent communities, and equitable social policy, 102 did seem a reasonable cutoff.
When you look across the table, above the Domaine Laroche Chablis, pan-seared-whatever, and caramelized cheesecake, you see the encouraging, hopeful face of someone who believes in you. Someone who will read every word of your manuscript and think about how to make it better.
I was missing Walter Mosley, and I saw that “The Last Days” is now streaming—with Samuel L. Jackson, no less, as that ninety-one-year-old. No way was I going to disrespect Mosley, a consummate writer, by streaming before reading. I opened the book.