Edvard Munch’s The Scream qualifies as an iconic image only for people who have never seen it. Its power to transfix, its ineluctable pull on the eye, is such that it qualifies as iconic before we even define the word. For everyone else who has seen it recycled and repurposed from The Simpsons […]
Between my late teens and early twenties, when at last the finite nature of time and the seemingly infinite number of “Best Of” lists pressed on my mind, I relied on the book John Kobal Presents the Top 100 Movies (1988) to find a way through the yet undiscovered terrain of great […]
Growing up, I shunned anything shaped like a heart, anything ruffled or bedazzled, anything pink. In the first two instances, my antipathy holds—unless the heart holds Godiva chocolates. But my own heart does a secret leap, like a kid embarrassed to love ballet and practicing in an empty room, whenever I find myself […]
Someone told me once that I lived a monkish life. She meant something vaguely Buddhist rather than vaguely Catholic, I think, but when pressed she said only that I was bald, lived quietly, read books and wrote a lot, and liked to walk and cook as if they were meditative activities. I […]
The December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by alleged gunman Luigi Mangione on the streets of New York City had all the hallmarks of a bold revolutionary act, broadly spelled out in three words inscribed on cartridge cases found at the murder scene: “Delay,” “Deny,” “Depose.” For revolutionaries in waiting, […]
The Candyman films (1992 and 2021) set out to tell a harrowing narrative of historical and modern-day racial violence in Chicago. Oddly, this began when director Bernard Rose bought the rights to Clive Barker’s novella The Forbidden. The Forbidden dealt with themes of class and social abandonment in the UK. Still, Rose, […]
The biannual Art & Design sale at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, in St. Louis’ Metro East, was as well-attended last weekend as usual. Visitors shopped in the atrium of the Art & Design building for ceramics as well as glass, metal, photo, and print objects. Proceeds funded the Wagner Potters Association, […]
The fabric is Scottish broadcloth, a white as warm as the sunlit cathedral stone. The colors have the pure brilliance of the stained glass. The design is clean, strong, and radiant; I cannot imagine anything more joyful. Or riskier. In a time when many Catholics are growing more conservative, the Archbishop of Paris […]
On Monday, November 25, Leonard Slatkin and the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis will present D.BachL, presumably pronounced “debacle,” a tribute to the composer Peter Schickele (who died on January 16 at age 88) and his comical alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach. It is sure to be a night of fun […]
My assignment (this was years ago) was to profile Archbishop Justin Rigali. A shy, diffident man who had zero desire to talk to the press. Frantic for insight, I did the usual sharklike circling, interviewing everyone I could find who knew him well. But the most helpful interview was with John Padberg, a […]
