The 2017 documentary The Blood Is at the Doorstep is getting new attention during the George Floyd protests, and for a brief time is available on YouTube for free. Blood is directed and produced by Erik Ljung, a filmmaker and Director of Photography who has produced…
Rally-goers reach their hands in prayer toward the family of Victor White III, who died in police custody in Iberia Parish in 2014. The George Floyd protests spread west across coastal Louisiana yesterday, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Lake Charles, 30 miles from Texas. The Lake…
Below St. Louis, the face masks disappeared. The sign on the door of the gas station near the St. Francois Mountains said, Please don’t come in here if you have a fever or bad cough. If you cough inside, please do it into your elbow. The second place…
Formats of food shows are pretty set these days. There are the competitions, brutal or kind. The ones that make food an oddity, a fetish, or glutton’s challenge. The chemistry-for-better-brining sort, often combined with The Traditionalists, who know these things by classical training and mastery. (I binge-watched the America’s Test…
My elder son tells me he wants adventure. Something memorable. Historic. Being born in the privateer age would have been nice. He worries there are no adventures left. I tell both my sons to notice what is going on and to remember. It is a historic age, of…
The new documentary Becoming, released May 6, is the second film from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, which signed with Netflix in 2018. Their first film (see my review here) was American Factory, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature last year. American…
In keeping with my habit of wondering about people I never see or talk to (and may not know at all), I decided to see how some of them are doing in the crisis. Bulrush, March 2020. Photo courtesy Rob Connoley. In June of last year…
In keeping with my habit of wondering about people I never see or talk to (and may not know at all), I decided to see how some of them are doing in the crisis. Standing Rock, December 2016. Photo by John Griswold. LaDonna…
Nicholas Vreeland is what passes for American royalty. He is the grandson of Diana Vreeland, the famous Editor-in-Chief of Vogue, and related to George Washington and Francis Scott Key. His father, “Freck,” was a longtime CIA officer and diplomat, and Nicky, as his family calls him, was born in…
If the Fleeting World is but a long dream, It does not matter whether one is young or old. But ever since the day that my friend left my side And has lived an exile in the City of Chiang-ling, There is one wish…