Peck of Dirt Is Heard from Again
While watching Peck of Dirt, I was thinking about the inscrutable, somewhat self-defeating, but ultimately lovable and inspiring character of the St. Louis rock music scene.
Arts & Letters
What Makes Abraham Verghese Such a Great Storyteller?
Is it his cosmopolitan background? His stint at the Iowa Writers Workshop? His knowledge of human suffering?
Sleeping on the Moon
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 in St. Louis
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.
The Spanish I Lost in Translation
La persona, a person, is feminine even if referring to a man. El vestido, the dress, is masculine, though la falda, the skirt, is feminine. Why do this to us?
Photographer Joel Meyerowitz Sums the Decades
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.
Bleak House v. Trump
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.
Platform Offers Documentaries on Photographers, Such as Josef Koudelka
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.
The Rage over “Adolescence”
What disgusted a handful of people about one of the best recent shows on television—and what that reveals about us
Documentary on Artist Art Spiegelman Worth a Watch
There is much of interest in the documentary “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse” about technique, layout, framing, visual style, and the burden of guilt in storytelling, because these things cannot do enough.