Film, Music, Visual Arts

Why The Innocents Is the Halloween Movie You Need

        Horror film connoisseurs are not born. They are made. They are made after watching endless iterations of the jump scare, after several trips to the kitchen or bathroom while basic plot points mount into ratcheting tension, and after nerves and stomach are steeled against dry heaves while viewing mind-bending scenes of […]

New Documentary Portrays Intrigue at Venice Biennale

        “Cultural diplomacy”—the propagation of art and other culture by a government as a form of soft power—can be a tricky thing. As UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) says, “Beyond State driven policy processes, cultural diplomacy engages a wide range of non-governmental actors such as artists, curators, journalists, […]

The Guilty Pleasures of Emily in Paris

    Friends give me tiny Eiffel towers, and my husband knows he is safe if he buys me any object, garment, wine, or pastry said to be French. I have always been drawn to French culture, by which I of course mean French literature, art, music, and philosophy—but mainly, because I am a shallow […]

Searching for Debussy’s Cathedral, Behind the Wheel

    Nothing sorts extraordinary drives from ordinary ones quite like the selection of music to accompany the journey. That is especially true when the drive is long. A vacation drive has its own curious logistics of pre-planning. Water bottles must be cleaned out, snacks must be chosen for purchase, the endless worry of a […]

That Wild Creature Neko Case

      I suspect any serious lover of music has a mental checklist of musical artists who deserve a much larger audience than they have garnered. Neko Case—who will begin her next tour in St. Louis at The Sheldon on September 18—stands near the top of my list. I first heard her as a […]

Welcome to the Plug-in California

      Being too cool for the Los Angeles rock band the Eagles was enshrined in the Coen Brothers’ classic film The Big Lebowski (1998). The Dude (Jeff Bridges) has been doped by a pornographer and brained in the forehead with a coffee mug by the Malibu Police chief, yet he still retains the […]

Making Contact

    “Oh, it’s just a print,” the homeowner says, waving toward the lithograph’s number and signature. Just a print? Does she realize humans learned to print art long before Gutenberg printed sentences? That printing a woodcut required an engraver to make more than a thousand cuts just to chip out slivers between the crosshatch […]

The Photography of Gaucha Berlin

    In the movie Hit Man (funny, smart, well done, morally questionable but you end up not caring—and is that a good thing or worrisome?), the central question is whether we can change. Can someone escape what looks like their fate and reinvent themselves? Which ties to the question I have long wrestled with: […]