Image from Wikipedia CC. Higher education in the United States is a big ship, with a well-established route and trade. I was a paying passenger, for the usual time, then served as a line officer for two decades. One day, in some backwater in the Horse Latitudes, I…
A still from the Q&A after Herzog’s latest feature film. Director Werner Herzog’s latest feature film is now available, which always gives me cause for relief and surprise. In a world of Netflix fast-food, a Herzog film is a bowl of Bavarian leberknödelsuppe—something interesting and nourishing, with…
The character Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation is likable because we understand he is better than the sum of the parts he wants to present to the world. Actor Nick Offerman uses his Ron Swanson persona a little in the new CuriosityStream series The History of…
The Pythons: Terry Jones, Graham Chapman. John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, and Michael Palin. Wikimedia promotional images. The documentary series Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer’s Cut) is available on Netflix. Originally airing on BBC and the Independent Film Channel, in 2009, it is just six episodes, a…
Netflix, which uses the odd tagline “Netflix is a joke,” released Dave Chappelle’s new standup special yesterday on YouTube. As I have written before, standup as an art continues to become something other than jokes, and Chappelle, who won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor…
Grocery shoppers in St. Louis, Missouri, have begun making their choices, this Dairy Freedom Week, for the kind of milk they like best. Red Team Milk and Blue Team Milk appeared, over the weekend, in separate refrigerated cases in six of the largest supermarkets in the region. The milk…
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…