Inefficiency Can Save You
Tiny, incapacitating acts of rebellion can keep you human. Or is this masochism?
Dispatches
How Much Mariano Rivera Did Not Want to Talk to Me
I thought I would take this slow moment to tell a baseball story—at a time when the names of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and (the most perishable of these names) Scott Brosius are not yet lost to common memory.
When Words Become Sounds
Words need the company of other words, preferably lots of them, else they fall into a strange pit of meaningless, yet mind-altering sound. Like us, words are social when mingling in tantalizing combinations, and perilously, curiously lonely, but still attractive, by themselves.
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.
Was St. Louis’s Hamlet to Be, or Not to Be?
After a string of near-disasters, Hamlet emerges unscathed.
Zora Neale Hurston Holds Up
"It’s so easy to make yo’self out God Almighty when you ain’t got nothin’ tuh strain against but women and chickens.”
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.
Beethoven’s Immoral, Tasteless Usurpers, and Then Some
What hurts so much about these depressing examples is that they reveal one of the world’s greatest composers to be little more than window dressing to our naïve hopes about enlightened hearts and human progress. How could an artist of such immortal genius be so powerless, almost helpless, when confronted by the darkness of the human heart? And if art as elevated as Beethoven cannot help save us from ourselves, who can?
How to Restore the Art of Conversation
“We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.”
Peck of Dirt Is Heard from Again
While watching Peck of Dirt, I was thinking about the inscrutable, somewhat self-defeating, but ultimately lovable and inspiring character of the St. Louis rock music scene.