Clik here to view.
It’s Over and You Missed It
This weekend I got immersed in a strange combination of three books, of wildly varying quality: Renata Adler’s stunning After the Tall Timber (2015), a retrospective of nonfiction writing (from The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My Star Wars
A true Jedi makes his or her own lightsaber — and a true Star Wars fan makes his or her own Star Wars. I never expected to create my own versions of the original trilogy, but in 2010, that’s exactly...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bowie Saved Me
A child sits alone at home, a teenager, upset, angry, sad, misunderstood. The bedroom has posters and a barricaded door and may be anywhere in the world; I picture one in Illinois where my grandfather...
View ArticleClik here to view.
David Brooks: Retrograde Motion
I just realized that David Brooks (“Why America’s Leadership Fails” is like a pre-Copernican (with the Post-Structuralists and Marxists*, or, really, any reasonably decent social critic, as...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Meadow House 1
My first full-scale architecture project started in Robert Meredith’s Advanced Architecture class in high school, wherein eight or nine students were given a final assignment of conceiving a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Of Grosse Pointe and David Simon
Despite the joy of seeing beloved family members, I returned from Grosse Pointe, MI this week even more depressed than I’d been at any point since the election, since the casual, obscene racism and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Silent Third Panel
As I look (again) at Peanuts — the entire 50-year-project, and its astonishing achievement — I’m noticing new things. I’ve learned, for example, about how everyone credits Schulz with inventing not...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Out of Touch
What’s absolutely infuriating me right now, more than the daily psychic blows of the Trump era, is the way that my own (and others’) expectation that Hillary would win the election is being turned...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Art of the Sale
It worries me that the speech was “a success” because it reminds me of experiences with publicity/promotion types for whom “success” is a non-negotiable perfect attribute, like the speed of light, so...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Movie Loves, Lost and Found
Sometimes I end up watching two movies back-to-back that are not just different, but are polar opposites—that balance each other in such a perfectly bizarre yin/yang juxtaposition that the randomized...
View Article
