Getting It Wrong Again
It was an astonishing moment for me, who never felt settled in what he knew.
By Sacha Mardou
A Memo on My Idea of America
Everyone past the age of reason carries an internal model of the nation where they live. The model describes, with varying complexity and correspondence to reality, the landscape, climate, cultures, history, vibes, and human possibilities and dangers, including what that person believes they can be in relation to their country, and their expectations for treatment by the government and fellow citizens. If enough people talk about their overlapping models, you might get political parties, widespread patriotism, rebellion, nationalism, or talk of a zeitgeist.
Recipes for Rascals in Distant Cities: Greens
I would suggest using an iron skillet, the kind they made before inferior castings. Do I need to say the old ways are often best? Heat it up for five minutes at medium-high as you prep your ingredients.
Rich in Proportion to the Number of Things Let Alone
Crap transference is when people give you things they own, apparently with good intentions, except you do not need or want them, and in fact may not have known they existed.
Every Path Has Multiple Meanings
I could not tell if the old-timer meant that if I walked fast enough I would not be bitten by bugs, or that he wanted me to get the hell away from him.
Hiking with the Lorax of Shawnee National Forest
Sam Stearns is a rascal who has seen lively times. Some of those have been while working with other environmentalists—for almost four decades without pay and at significant personal risk—in defense of southeastern Illinois’s Shawnee National Forest, which they hope will become a National Park and the world’s first climate preserve.
New Documentary on the Artist Jealous of Pee-wee Herman
Paul Reubens, aka Pee-wee Herman, insists on camera that the documentary must not be of the “tears of a clown” variety. It is an admirable attitude, but Matt Wolf’s film, perhaps inevitably, emphasizes Reubens’s problems.
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.
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.
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 Enduring Significance of a French Soldier’s Amateur Preservation of Vietnamese Heritage
The project is so daft it is touching: an attempt at nothing less than a comprehensive visual catalog of the entire material culture and socio-familial life of the Vietnamese as they were then, an attempt initiated by a young man in the colonizing machinery meant to drag the Vietnamese into a Western conception of modernity.
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.