Courtesy Fantagraphics Books Steve Brodner’s Living & Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle, 2020-2022, is a fascinating and unusual graphic memoir. In the book’s 476 pages, Brodner has captured the feel of the first two Covid years by drawing one image every evening from that day. These range…
The concept of sumptuary laws is so alien, I am intrigued. Though they pretended to be highminded and austere, a free pass could nearly always be bought.
The next time I wonder what I am feeling, maybe I should take my actual pulse. What is my body feeling? How should I interpret that? Will a label help, and if so, what label will help the most? Because I suspect I jump too quickly to the same old conclusions.
Orange is a wonderful color, useful for denoting everything from royalty to religion, from the incarcerated to the insightful.
This a tricky time to start a theatre company. But halfway into Albion Theatre company's run of "Heroes," the play is a resounding success. It ignores short attention spans, opening with the three vets sitting silent on the patio, staring at the weather.
We do need our muck raked. But who, in the current corporate oligarchy, will want to pay for that? And in a media landscape clogged with charging knights—their steeds kicking up clouds of dust in every direction—how are we to locate moral clarity?
Mississippi River, steamboat, dinner cruise, St. Louis, waterfront, excursion
While I have never had the courage to—another telling phrase—“prance around” naked in public, I can imagine how free it would feel. To move through the world naked as the day you were born, casting aside all costume, an emperor unashamed? To be unclothed is to be vulnerable, your flesh unhidden and unprotected; to be comfortable being vulnerable is to relax, easy in your own skin at last.
Were they with her, I wonder, when she died? I hope so. No living creature is as much comfort at a deathbed.
The memorial service for Joan Didion, who died December 23, 2021, was held this week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. (You can watch it here. There is no audio during the slideshow at the start.) Organizers explained the…