"Do things have beginnings, do you think? Or is a beginning only the first revelation of something that's always been there, waiting to be found?" Steven Millhauser. Documentation of the first sentence of every text I've read since Feburary 2011:
Drill two holes in a canvas // In golden days, time was true // If you happened to be a writer who, like me, occasionally covers the art scene, you, too, would probably grow inured to having your daily mail larded (or should I say festooned?) with cards and notices promoting the various upcoming openings and exhibitions // So I was visiting my friends my friends Pepe and Dionara in Santiago, Chile, a while back—they're great art lovers and their apartment nests a collection of marvelous books—and Pepe was escorting me through this one particularly sumptuous volume given over to the life and works of the Venezualan folk master Juan Felix Sanchez (weaver, potter, sculptor, builder-by-hand of rock-hewn highland churches); and, presently, turning the page, we happened into a magisterial spread by the photographer Sigfrido Geyer, evoking the undulating hill approach to Sanchez's hardscrabble layer, and, quite unself-consciously, I found myself gasping: "Velasquez's Venus" // About three years ago, on an art walk through Soho, in a gallery off Broadway, I happened upon a large-scale color-saturated photograph that stopped me cold: Tina Barney's double portrait of what were clearly a father and his late-teenaged daughter, staring head-on into the camera // For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone // Like many these days, Shiva sits around too much, eating too much, eating rich, fatty foods and sipping sugary drinks // The 17-second video, assembled from security cameras in Harlem, showed what seemed to be an ordinary man, in a cap and a leather jacket, walking down the street with an ordinary suitcase // My wife was about to go into the operating room for a scheduled C-section a few months ago when a nurse asked me an urgent question: "Where is your camera?" // There are certain things that creative people share in common, and a lively chat with the artist Doug Aitken seems to be one of them // Kanye West spent New York fashion week under a self-imposed cone of silence, refusing to talk to the news media // It has been more than 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the World Wide Web as a shared system of hypertext that would give almost anyone access to the resources of the Internet // Cabbage is a cold-weather staple // I bought a puppy last week in the outskirts of Boston and drove him to Maine in a rented For that looked like a sculpin // To come upon an article in the Times called "The Meaning of Brown Eggs" was an unexpected pleasure // I am lying here in my private sick bay on the east side of town between Second and Third avenues, watching Sterlings from the vantage point of my bed // There is no doubt about it, the fierce desire to write and paint that burns in our land today, the incredible amount of writing and painting that still goes on in the face of heavy odds, are directly traceable to the St. Nicholas Magazine // Analysts have had their go at humor, and I have read some of this interpretive literature, but without being greatly instructed // Waking or sleeping, I dream of boats—usually of rather small boats under a slight press of sail // "The theme of my life," E.B. White wrote in his fifty-eighth year, "is complexity-through-joy" // The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest // For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone // Who am I? // Life begins somewhere with the scent of lavendar // Yale's Sterling Memorial Library is chock full of loonies of whom I am one // Christopher Byron has had the misfortune of writing a lengthy book on Martha Stewart's business dealings that went to press before news broke of what would surely have been its centerpiece—the Imclone scandal // According to a study just released by Duke University, life is too hard // My daughter, Olivia, who just turned three, has an imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli // Sometimes writing a letter is simply an exercise in getting your thoughts and feelings out on paper // So today I met Karl, the submarine inventor // They guy across the street is an insurance salesman // San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, Baltimore, Boston, and Los Angeles: what do these cities have in common? // TRISH KENNEDY! It is little Dan Kennedy, out on his big magazine adventure // One question I get a lot is, Ellie, how the hell are you such a genius at giving maid-of-honor wedding toasts? // Hello from airports again! // Trish - Ok, alive down here for now // Last night I had a disturbing dream // My sisters and I aren't sure, but it's possible that our mom, Sue, is currently stranded in Portugal // Unlike some people around here, I will compost literally everything // I would've written sooner, but I "celebrated" my fortieth this year // Remember that guy I was telling you about a few years ago? // Introducing GOING OUTSIDE, the astounding multipurpose activity platform that will revolutionize the way you spend your time // The art journalist Tetsuya Ozaki, writing in the catalogue for "ByeBye Kitty!!!," a show of new Japanese art, at the Japan society, dubs that country's youth of today the "floating generation," who are reacting against "the collapse of the grand narrative and the failure of Japanese society to make its people happy" // Anniversaries are uplifting when you have something to celebrate // What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind // Sixteen years ago Tam Klein was staring at a woody woodpecker cartoon, "The Loose Nut," when he started seeing things // Jean Tinguely's "Homage to New York" was billed as the ultimate homemade gadget—a towering contraption composed of found junk, dismembered bicycles, dismantled musical instruments, glass bottles, a meteorological ballon and electric motors in questionable condition // When Malia Jensen was little, growing up in the wooded foothills of rural Oregon, an issue of Esquire magazine informed her of a little fact that has stuck with her ever since // The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself occurs ad infinitum! // We here at the historical society are tireless in the pursuit of the past // I first saw Wolf in March of junior year // Hazel Whiting had finished her freshman year at Mountain Hills High, where there were a lot of ponytails and clanging metal lockers with pictures of hotties taped inside // Welcome to my apartment // You are angry, Elena // Few of us now recall that perilous summer // Yellowstone and Glacier are starting points // Large mantilla combs reaching upward like latticed gates: "cruel" lips, swirling capes, and gaucho hats worn at rakish angles; pulsating mounds of lace and jewelry; enough confetti, streamers, and masks to celebrate a new millenium — the decor, costumes, and acting in Josphe von Sternberg's "the Devil Is a Woman" (1935), the last and wildest of the director's six American films with Marlene Dietrich, are astounding // Chetrit's deliciously deadpan black-and-white photographs look as though they were lifted from vintage how-to books or from histories of the Surrealist object // What began as a post-minimalist caprice derived from Bruce Nauman—casting the negative spaces under or inside common things—is now a versatile idiom of strong, beautiful sculpture and relief // If there are spectres hovering over the British artist's show, they're the Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar Wai and the ways in which the black male viewers have responded to Chinese martial arts films (think the Wu Tang Clan) // Marcopoulous fills on of this alternative space's white rooms with several hundred black-and-white photocopies of snapshots he made between 2007 and 2010 in San Francisco, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, and a slew of other cities // For the oddly unsettling black-and-white series that he calls "Mid-century studio," Douglas imagined himself in the role of a busy photographer whose subjects range from magic tricks to a suspect under arrest // The color photographs that Haber Fitield toot at ingratiatingly modest—much like the farms themselves, some of which don't appear to be much bigger than several suburban backyards // Before he became an artist, David Altmejed, thirty-six, wanted to be an evolutionary biologist, and his sculptures from compartmental tableaux to freestanding figures, are rooted in ideas of taxonomy and mutation // Back in the early nineties, there was a concert trend in which a group of songwriters would sit onstage on stools, tell stories about their songs and then play them // Gothic perfection // Candy Darling was a movie star's dream of what a movie star should look like // The Indian photographer makes a provocative American debut with a scrappy, eccentric array of still lifes, portraits, and nudes //there's nothing modern about Shikama's small photographs of forests and plants in Japan; his pictures, all taken since 2003, could have been made at any time in the twentieth century // Martin has the mind of a semiotician and a hand so precise it could pass for a scanner // "Arthur," a remake of the sloshed "classic" from 1981, has so many things wrong with it that one can only stare at the screen in disbelief // Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden can hardly be confused // Coming in at the very tail end of official Portland Fashion week proceedings, "Fashion Collective" took over the Armory's atrium on Monday night, October 12, with some of the most impressive design work seen in Portland's recent history // All too often actors are limited by their looks // Bring whatever you think of Romare Bearden to his startling show of twenty-two collages at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery // In 2004, Merrill Garbus created an adaptation of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" called "fat Kid Opera," whose songs she composed on soprano ukelele // Cory Arcangel was making a drawing but he wasn't holding a pen // The suspect is an unknown male, around six feet tall // The long search in a harsh, materialistic world for some kind of spiritual beauty leads Olaf Karuson through a turbulent life in the villages of Iceland in the early twentieth century // In 1955, at the age of fifty--three Halldor Kiljan Laxness became the first Icelandic writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature // He was standing on the foreshore below the farm with the oyster catchers and purple sandpipers, watching the waves soughing in and out // A note to the art lovers lining up at Gagosian to see "Picasso and Marie-Therese, L'Amour Fou": when you're done, walk one block south // In 2008, during his fourth campaign to be come prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi released a video in which a beautiful blond woman, standing in a grocery store beside a pile of bananas, sings "there's a big dream that lives in all of us" // My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university // Antonia's very good-looking younger sister, Betsy, knew better than to expect even minimal tact or sensitivity from her husband, Jim—he had, after all, proposed to her with the words "If you want me to marry you, I'll do it," and she had, after all, accepted this proposal—and so she couldn't fairly be offended when Jim began to hint that she should have some work done // Rock and roll is like a religion for heretics, and Garland Jeffreys has been a true unbeliever for decades // Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child // I did my best to flunk out of high school
// Near the end of her 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather serves up what is probably the most unsentimental betrothal scene in all western fiction // The pig sizzles on the spit, its eyes not so much blank as boiled // London: Mike and his wife and daughter, my wife and I, and a man called Richard Pratt // When I first heard Diane Arbus's voice, I felt as if I'd known it all along // That perfect letter // In a volume entitled The Best Creative Nonfiction, you are probably expecting work by the literary giants—Annie Dillard, John McPhee, tom Wolfe, Joan Didion—but instead you get Sunshine O'Donnell // Mary Anderson is fading, as surely as a forgotten Polaroid // From Scotland, for more than 125 years, the Gifford Lectures have been dispatched into the world owing to the behest and endowment of Adam Lord Gifford, a nineteenth-century Edinburgh advocate and judge with a passion for philosophy and natural theology
Sometimes one welcomes an excuse for not having to pay attention to everything // "Nothing ever changes" may be one of the truest things ever said // American universities crowd the tops of many world rankings, and though these ratings are basically entertainment for university administrators and alumni, they do reflect certain facts // Blue Nights is a haunting memoir about the death of Joan Didion's daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, at the age of thirty-nine, death from an infection that began just before Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack at the dinner table // Once famous for no more than co-hosting Singled Out, Chris Hardwick has reinvented himself in recent years as one of the internet's most premier nerd celebrities, consolidating a nexus of comedy, pop culture, and nerd nostalgia, nerdist.com // Until her suicide in 1971, photographer Diane Arbus made a career out of documenting "freaks" // There are two ways to describe Annie Proulx's memoir, "Bird Cloud," an account of her Sisyphean struggle to build her dream house on a remote and striking 640-acre stretch of land in Wyoming // Like almost everyone who was a teenager in the early 1980s, when the Music Television network first went live on cable, I wanted my MTV // Art Spiegelman's Maus, the most unconventional great book yet written about the Holocaust, the one that turned Nazis into cats and Jews into mice and Poles into pigs, turns 25 this year // Minot, ND -- There are four seasons up here, the joke goes: winter, winter, winter, and construction // In 1984, a young man named Malcolm graduated from the University of Toronto and moved to the United States to try his hand at journalism // In Montana, you need not go far in search of wounds // The statistics aren't that strong // One of the many small surprises of the recession has been a significant growth in the number of philosophy majors, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer // Tina Fey once confessed that she sometimes screams inside her head, "I'm a fraud! They're on to me!" // I first heard the phrase "impostor syndrome" from a telephone psychic // Like most of her friends, Hollis Romanelli graduated from college last May and promptly moved back in with her parents // If certain readers find John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection Pulphead lacking in thematic cohesion, it's only because essay collections // A Simple Machine, Like the Lever might be your journal // If certain readers find John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection Pulphead lacking in thematic cohesion, it's only because essay collections shouldn't have to be cohesive // An argument is not the same thing as a quarrel // Utilitarian architecture, German-influenced typologies, Grumpy Old Men, and a tedious trend in contemporary photography all pop up in Scott Peterman's minimal and reserved Photographs of New England ice fishing shacks at Charles Hartman this month // In 1999, I was a peon at a photography organization, charged with running the slide projector at the meetings where artists were selected for exhibition // Gus van Sant's last three films—Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days—were, shall we say, "demanding" works // Your enjoyment of Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins can be predetermined by one question: Do you think an obstacle course showdown between Martin Lawrence and Cedric the Entertainer sounds hilarious? // A documentary film is part stunt, part lab experiment, and the way a documentary filmmaker pursues his or her story will always involve a bit of amateur sleuthing, as well as improv // One notorious feature of the world of art historians is the fatal 'ism' - that process of compartmentalising the Western canon into easy-to-swallow packets // Martin Parr is to exhibit celebrity photographs from his own collection at the newly opened Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool at the start of next year // Unless you're in the middle of a desert or on the high seas, it is difficult to escape architecture // I started out reviewing for student newspapers: always a good discipline because it gets you used to writing to length and makes you instantly accountable to readers // The only rule: look, look again, and keep on looking // One of the hard truths about dance criticism is that you're on your own // The way I got started was simply gaining a background in writing and journalism // Not everyone will become an artist, but we all will be art appreciators and consumers // Few people will pursue careers as choreographers, performers or dance critics, but most will see dance in at least some of its many forms // Dance critics provide uniquely valuable documentation of the history of this elusive art form, a service no less important since the advent of videotape, film, and notations // The whole thing started with that movie // In the spring of 1959, a twenty-one-year-old Australian architecture student named Robert Hughes made his first visit to Rome // London in the early autumn this year felt much like a tale of two cities // When I read that an NYU professor was allegedly fired for giving James Franco a "D," I was shocked for several reasons // There was, for many years, a big photograph of Judy Garland by the late, great William Claxton duct-taped to the wall of the Barney's display studio where I worked // Journalists—certainly the smart ones—live with the question of veracity, and the question, always, of what makes a truthful account of anything // It is not entirely the fault of the recent movie My week with Marilyn—about Monroe's disastrous attempt to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier—that it is devoid of sex, which is something like depicting the life of Napoleon without mentioning that he was French // Some books make modest claims // Exhibitions of drawings by Leonardo, almost always based on the uniquely rich collection in the Royal Library at Windsor, are relatively common // Every election year brings vivid reminders of how money distorts our politics, poisons our lawmaking, and inevitably widens the gulf between those who can afford to buy influence and the vast majority of Americans who cannot // The future of contemporary dance lies in part in rediscovering its past in the rich history of classical ballet according to Edouard Lock, one of the country's leading contemporary choreographers // Burroughs documentary? // To construct a book on the work of an artist such as Bruce Nauman, which is diverse in thought, multilayered in meaning, and given to subtle richness of experiential exploration, requires considerable cooperation on the part of many individuals // The challenge involved in categorizing Bruce Nauman is related not only to the breadth of different media with which he works but to his persistence in exploring art as investigation of the self // Given the breadth of his career and the widespread recognition of the significance of his art, Bruce Nauman has conducted relatively few interviews over the course of the past thirty-five years // Mike Kelley, one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion, was found dead on Wednesday at his home in South Pasadena, Calif // The art produced during the 1980s veered between radical and conservative, capricious and political, socially engaged and art historically aware // This may sound familiar // Yesterday, Deadline reported that a TV pilot that Louis C.K. and Spike Feresten wrote 13 years ago had been resurrected // Ed. note: questions that have nothing to do with sex and/or relationships are always encouraged, too // Richard Aldrich's paintings defy a signature style but share a signature sensibility, a slack virtuosity that belies its interest in communication and self-reference // This group of artists, being deeply concerned with transposing pictorial issues onto anti-conventional mediums in a traditional manner, focus their attention on the creative processes for its own sake as compared to the representation of reality, pitting their various creative processes and attitudes against the concept of "abstract material" // It was a pleasure to burn // In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini // We know of hardly any painters who are born to their art already armed head to toe with their own technique, masters of their palette, touch, impasto, glazes // They used to tell a story about my father, who was a musician // i hadn't been thinking about los angeles before coming up here // This book was researched and written over the course of a decade and draws on a lifetime spent in dance // Richard Aldrich's solo debut introduces a committed but hardly monogamous painter // MoMA PS1 presents the first American museum survey of the paintings of Berlin-based artist Sergej Jensen // When children's television comes up in conversation, everyone knows the drill // The older I get, the more I'm convinced that a fiction writer's oeuvre is a mirror of the writer's character // A central motif in contemporary hip-hop is rapping about drug dealing by artists who may not actually sell narcotics // HBO has two new documentaries, each dramatizing a miscarriage of justice // New York may be a concrete jungle, but it does have some soil and sky // JD Souther, who is sixty-six, lives on a farm outside Nashville, and is most widely known for his part in writing sombre, elegiac songs that the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt made famous, such as "New Kid in Town," "Heartache Tonight," and "Faithless Love" // Last Tuesday, while Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney campaigned in Florida, Buddy Roemer walked toward Zuccotti Park // We like Foo Fighters // In the late 1990s, I taught Anglo-American law at Charles University in Prague // Philip Glass's place in musical history is secure // The monumental 1982 Keith Haring drawing Untitled is not often on view, so its inclusion in the Museum's current installation Contemporary Galleries: 1980-Now seems like an ideal opportunity to think about how this artist's iconic visual language fits into the larger story of 20th-century art // Over the past few years, Brian Kennon has emerged as one of the most active and generous participatns in the Los Angeles art scene // The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without // In 2007, my mother and I traveled to New York to see Vanessa Redgrave portray Joan Didion in "The Year of Magical Thinking" // My neighbor, a leadership development consultant who regularly helps improve themselves through personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, once told me I was the most introverted person he'd ever met // The best product always wins! // Can a brownie be too rich? // You’re Doing It Wrong is appearing on Tuesday rather than Wednesday this week, because it’s not just any Tuesday—it’s Shrove Tuesday, also known as Mardi Gras, also known as Pancake Day // The photographer Duane Michals, who turns eighty on February 18, pursues a distinctive approach to his medium that seems all the more remarkable today for being so resolutely low-tech // Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question "If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn't want us to know, can you do that?" // If there is any doubt that we're living in the age of the individual, a look at the housing data confirms it // If Edward Morris didn't show up to work, and you worked with him, it woud impact you in the following way: You would have to take the stairs // With talk of a military confrontation with Iran fast becoming the daily lead story in the international news pages, the average art lover's thoughts likely turn to Goya who began work on his infamous Disasters of War series two centuries ago this month // You better sissy that walk, girl! // Reality TV has the reputation of dehumanizing people, but my brief experience on it was to the contrary // Because my adoration for Whitney Houston is well documented, people have been offering their condolences to me, which is a little weird (it's not like I knew her better than anyone!) but entirely nice // Jed Martin, the hero of Michel Houellebecq's new novel, is the first of his major characters to make it to the end of a book without checking into a psychiatric ward or committing suicide // The late Portland-based artist Robert Hanson is not especially well known beyond the Pacific Northwest; this is due in large part to his unwavering dedication to figure drawing // In recent years, elected officials and policymakers such as former president George W. Bush, former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have agreed that there should be "no excuses" for schools with low test scores // What would it mean for a country to change profoundly? // In one sense, the analysts who forecast that 'peak oil'—i.e. the point at which the rate of global petroleum extraction will begin to decline—would be reached over the last few years were correct // The show of Renaissance portraits now on view in New York is of staggering beauty and revelatory importance // After meeting Bill de Kooning, one thing that first became apparent was that he had amazing skills of observation // When the trailer for Wes Anderson's latest movie, Moonrise Kingdom, arrived, it sparked a debate in the Slate office about whether Anderson needed to "grow up" // Since when did being a writer become a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders? // Interviewed after winning England's Costa Prize for Literature in late January, the distinguished novelist Andrew Miller remarked that while he assumed that soon most popular fiction would be read on screen, he believed and hoped that literary fiction would continue to be read on paper // In 1991, in need of change and disillusioned with what I perceived to be the art world's shallow relationship to sociopolitical issues, I enrolled at Hunter College // When the italian photographer Luigi Ghirri died unexpectedly at his home in Reggio Emilia in 1992, he had been working on two projects: a series of still lifes, and a series depicting the decaying houses of the Po Valley in the northern Italian province where he had lived most of his life // One warm evening in August 1937 a girl in love stood before a mirror // We're always fascinated with photographs of times gone by and so we were immediately taken in by these dusty images of young miners that we spotted over at Environmental Graffiti // Hollywood is a place where folks are often recognized more for their looks than their talent - and actress Hedy Lamarr was no exception // Cartooning is a solitary pursuit // Those of us who own pets know they make us happy // I know a lot of artists who get drunk a lot // Launching a play about Mark Rothko at the same moment that the art museum is hosting Portland's first Rothko retrospective is a strike of cross-promotional brilliance // One of China's most outspoken public intellectuals, Ran Yunfei was detained last year after calls went out for China to emulate the "Jasmine Revolution" protests sweeping North Africa // In his 2012 State of the Union adddress, President Barack Obama proposed that teachers should "stop teaching to the test" and that the nation should "reward the best ones" and "replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn" // In 1982, Mississippi senator John Stennis was chariman of the Armed Services Committee // Disjecta's Portland 2012: A Biennial of Contemporary Art is kicking into high gear // Oh my god, you have to tell your mother you said that // I have revolting childhood memories of fetuses // The Whitney Biennial has been called alot of things since it began, as an Annual, in 1932 // What is contemporary art? // I am watching a black man gyrate in front of me in a thong over gray briefs // "She could have been signed on the basis of her pedigree alone," said columnist Stephen Metcalf, talking about Whitney Houston on Slate's culture podcast Tuesday, four days after the singer's death // We lead busy lives and use our limited time as an excuse to procrastinate and avoid getting things done, but often claiming we don't have time is a lie // There was a time, not long ago, when I was busy, busy, busy // Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race // The viral seems to have a close cousin in the almost true // It's hard out there for a young person today // My reminders of Clark, who died nearly three years ago, are still visible, bust as my life adjusts to a world without him, I've moved a few things so they're a bit more out of the way // One phrase of the celebrated Martha Graham's which moves me is this, 'A body cannot lie' // Get your thesauras out (people still carry those, right? I mean dictionaries just GIVE you the answer), because the term for the day is 'collective movement' // Here's some facts // Oh man // The Hunger Games movie is so much better than it needs to be // Susan Orlean is proof that being the consummate narrative journalist doesn't conflict with becoming the consummate Twitterer // For anyone who can remember being floored by the mid-1980s Chrysler Sedan that warned "your door is ajar" in delightful monotone, it's still kind of thrilling that Cadillacs come with wifi these days // Just when you think all of the saddest uses for social media have been discovered, someone finds a way to do something even more depressing // I know I talk crap on being a twentysomething but I'm only half kidding // Is it the partially handheld camera or the partially handheld life that makes one woozy when watching the bold and talented Lena Dunham, whose much anticipated show, "Girls" will air on April 15th? // I was always told from an early age to be balanced in everything that I do // The age of the art critic as an unassailable voice of authority is long gone // I would like to tell you everything // Summing up the perverse brilliace that is the Daily Mail almost too perfectly, self-appointed attractive white lady Samantha Brick wrote a lengthy and self-pitying article about the 'downsides to looking this pretty' // The Christmas after I moved to New York, my mom gave me the complete DVD set of Seinfeld // All of a sudden, it's like you can't make huge amounts of money without people getting all pissed off about it // If you were a teen in the mid 90s and had cable television, most likely you know Michael Ian Black from The State, the sketch comedy show that aired on MTV // My first mistake was working at the mall, obviously // Everybody needs to calm down about Ryan Gosling saving me from a speeding car // The LA County's Coroner's Office has released the autopsy report regarding the death of legendary singer Whitney Houston // Black Mountain College is one of those places that almost everyone has heard of but few know much about, apart from the fact that Buckminster Fuller built a geodesic dome there, John Cage staged a'happening' and Merce Cunningham did a lot of dancing // Because I'm surrounded by artists in both my professional and personal life people often ask me what insights I've gained into the creative process // In February, Occupy Wall Street's Arts & Labor working group issued a call on the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) to stop issuing ads for unpaid internships // Can men and women be friends // From Leiter's blog, Michael Rosen (who wrote the excellent On Voluntary Servitude, a book I would write about if it weren't so dense that it'd require a huge amount of time to treat it) talks about academic strategies // Late-1914, an aspiring young writer named Max Fedder sent a copy of hi manuscript, "A Journal of One Who Is to Die," to Jack London, the author responsible for such works as The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and, most relevantly, Martin Eden—the bleak story of a young man battling to become a writer // And once again, I am late to the party // This morning (April 11, 2012), National Public Radio delivered a very well thought out human interest story with some in-depth research, but... one technical misunderstanding threw the whole story out the window. It all begins with a Civil War photograph from the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, a recent gift to the Library of Congress // With all the fanfare surrounding Lena Dunham's Girls, last night's premiere came as a bit of a surprise // If you didn't have your pesky ladyparts holding you back, you'd probably be rich right now // Today I'm headed to Columbia to take part in a symposium on the future of journalism—a subject that feels at once on some great cusp and under the weight of a myriad of conflicting pressures // Everywhere you look these days, there's a new "slow" movement // "I hate the guts of English grammar," E.B. White once famously proclaimed // In 1923, a prominent journalist bemoaned the death of the editor and the rise of the circulation manager as newspapers began grubbing for ever-more advertising revenue tailored their content around that goal, rather than around readers' best interests // It was in my late teens that I fell for Donald Barthelme // On our second trip together to Africa last Thanksgiving, we decided to go to the place where the deadliest war in the world was occurring: the Congo // The prosecutor wanted to know about the window coverings // You know what? // Dressed in a long sleeve black T-shirt and blue jeans, Philip Glass eases onto a couch in a corner room of his spacious Dunvagen studio // We're on the telephone, so I can't see Scrappers' face--but I imagine if I could, his eyes would be darting to and fro and his nostrils would be flaring // There is a yellowed newspaper clipping taped to the wall in the basement of the Berston Field House, in Flint, Michigan, that shows Jason Crutchfield with his arms in the air, winning the city boxing championship in 1983 // Among the many items on display at Obscura Antiques & Oddities, on Avenue A between Twelfth and Thirteenth Streets, is a leathery, somnolent-looking human head // Say you're a reasonably precocious high-school student in New York City and you believe a college admissions committee would take proper note if you were to make a short film in China featuring actors who, because they happen to be Chinese, speak only Chinese // When ESPN asked the National Football League, in 1980, if the network could broad cast its annual player draft, the league said, "Sure, but why would anyone want to watch it?" // The presidency of France's Fifth Republic is a monarchical role, shaped to the elongated scale and the grand manners first of Charles de Gaulle and then of Francois Mitterand // Before its format was gobbled up by television, in the early sixties, the revue was the bonne bouche of American musical theatre // In 1961, the director Shirley Clarke transformed Jack Gelber's Off-Broadway play "The Connection"—about a quartet of jazz musicians and their junkie friends waiting for their heroin dealer in a run-down loft—into a disturbing meta-movie // In the summer of 2007, Apple relased the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T.&T // Yes, there were slipups // I was in high school when I read The Bell Jar and thought it was about a lucky girl who wins a contest and gets to go to Europe // Life, said D.H. Lawrence, is a question of what you thrill to // Surprises abound in Jeanette Winterson's painfully candid and often very funny memoir of her girlhood in a North England household ruled by an adoptive Pentecostal mother—the "flamboyant depressive" Mrs. Constance Winterson // Talking to a class at the University of Mississippi one day late in his life, William Faulkner remarked that his cogenerationist Ernest Hemingway lacked courage as a writer, that he had always been too careful, never taking risks beyond what he knew he could do, never using "a word where the reader might check his usage by a dictionary" // In what U.S. city might you find an "alternative" art exhibition space on a 200-ton, 135-foot decommissioned crabbing ship? // Lately, there's been much conflicting news about autism rates // Leslie Sandoval doesn't remember much about the night his friend Seth Foster ended up dead and dismembered // Celastics was first trademarked in 1926 // We have all grown used to the idea that we should tell stories to children //
I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, and see it bound and tidy on my bookshelf, I will be unable to ever write about anything else // In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their teachers had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more complicated by fusing theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics // One reason it's sort of heroic to be a contemporary Expressionist is that it all but invites people who don't like your art to make an ad hominem move from the art to the artist // Right now it's Saturday 18 March, and I'm sitting in the extremely full coffee shop of the Fort Lauderdale Airport, killing the four hours between when I had to be off the cruise ship and when my flight to Chicago leaves by trying to summon up a kind of hypnotic sensuous collage of all the stuff I've seen and heard and done as a result of the journalistic assignment just ended // Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers // The year of 1922 famously saw the birth of High Modernism, mewling and puking as well as shining and sighing in Ulysses and in The Waste Land // Yvonne Rainer and The Village Voice go way back // Beyond the known forces conspiring to make a pigion of an honest editor these days—the bottom line, the top brass, slide shows of dogs, Rupert Murdoch—there is, lately, the added fear that when you say peculiar things to writers, they will put you on the Internet // Writers labor to make the visual world visible in fiction // What is literary criticism for? // A vignette from the campaign trail, circa March 2012: The Republican front-runner was taking questions at a town-hall meeting in Mahoning Valley, Ohio // At fifty-one, Fred has the fleshy body of a man who has spent most of his adult life in a cubicle // In a long letter from T.S. Eliot to John Quinn, dated July 9, 1919, one finds the following // Jean Cocteau's "Orpheus," from 1950 (at Athology Film Archives May 19-20), is a magical feast made at a time when magic was produced by nothing more than the malleability of the human body and by the (now peculiar) properties of the film medium, with its twenty-four still shots taken per second, which allowed directors to accelerate, slow, or reverse motion // John Douglas Thompson, who is forty-eight and regarded by some people as the best classical actor in America, has been acting for twenty years, following an epiphany he hd as a traveling salesman of computers, A.T.M.s, and check-sorting machines // I am in my bathrobe in the forest with my dog, Herman who is a German shepherd of unknowable age, because I refused to ever find out // Recently, I signed a lease with a major oil company allowing it to begin "cranial fracking"—deep drilling to tap the vast reserves of natural gas found in the human head // Surprises abound in Jeanette Winterson's painfully candid and often very funny memoir of her girlhood in a North England household ruled by an adoptive Pentecostal mother—the "flamboyant depressive" Mrs. Constance Winterson // Life, said D.H. Lawrence, is a question of what you thrill to // I arrive at Martin Creed's studio a few minutes before he does // As host of LA radio station KCRW's Bookeworm, Michael Silverblatt interview the most talked-about writers of our time—recent guests include Jonathan Lethem, Nobelist Orhan Pamuk, and Tao Lin—but it is his empathetic reading of the writers' work rather than the sheer wattage of the visiting leiterary stars that has made the radio program, now in its 20th year, the premier literary forum in America // We've been thinking it for two long years // Well // Like all good writers, Robert Walser was an inveterate borrower, at times wearing his influences openly // In recent years, there have been a few literary dustups — how insane is it that such a thing exists in a world at war? — about readability in contemporary fiction // The inner agony Edvard Munch felt when he feared losing his sight is to be explored in an exhibition which opens at London's Tate Modern this month, weeks after a version of his famous 1895 picture The Scream sold for a record EURO74m // It's great news that a Lucian Freud portrait has been given to the Tate // The young Italian artist, who participated in MOMA PS1's studio program ten years ago, returns to the museum for a mid-career survey // A hypnotizing sound overwhelmed the gallery, as if heralding an ominous event that never occurred // Alright, I'll say it // I can imagine all kinds of worlds and places, but I cannot imagine a world without Bradbury // Wes Anderson, god bless him, just keeps making Wes Anderson movies // A huge dock torn from a Japanese port by the 2011 tsunami has washed up 8,050 km away on the US West Coast after crossing the Pacific // No-one in China is lower in the pecking order than farmers and villagers // If you want to see someone who's miffed, then all eyes on me // Richard Long could have been named for his height: at 6 ft 4 he is craggily mountainous, with a giant stride and a pair of eyebrows that resemble bushes clinging to a rocky eminence //The first thing to say about artist's statements is that they're extremely hard to write; who wants to be an artist with one of those hanging over your head? // The tag project was begun as part of my research in preparation for my new series of work, Executive Order 9066; it is the first time I made the personal decision to really look at this sorry chapter in history as a Japanese American artist // It isn't easy to make money as an artist these days, but three crafty New Yorkers are managing to sell their work — and make a living — outside the traditional gallery system // "You have to love dancing to stick to it," said the late modern-dance giant Merce Cunningham — and given the grueling daily schedule choreographer Randee Paufve works, it's clear that she's one dancer-choreographer who does // Chefs (and the rest of us) often fantasize about what to pick for our last meal on Earth // Jillian Michaels catapulted to fame as the punishing trainer who got results on "The Biggest Loser" and "losing It with Jillian" // With the TV volume turned down, the woman in tank top and sweatpants seems diminuitive // In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend // I stood in a drafty living room covered in beer cans, overflowing ashtrays, and suspicious stains // For anyone who's ever suffered from depression or even some good old-fashioned self-doubt, it's nice to know that you're not alone // Readers of the Independent were in for a surprise this morning: a lengthy apology from that newspaper's star columnist Johann Hair, admitting to a plagiarism and the online harrassment of rival journalists (via pseudonymous assaults on their Wikipedia entries), and announcing that he was off to take a course of journalism training at his own expense // There is a distressing trend in film criticism // Near Christopher Street, in Hudson River Park, young gay and transgendered people of color sometimes hang out // I don't think I've ever seen a more spontaneously joyful performer than the young Spaniard Angel Corella // Ideal conversation should be a matter of equal give and take, but too often it is all "take" // If you're anything like us, you like a little quirk with your romance // As of Independence Day, 2012, forty-five of the fifty United States have adopted the Common Core curriculum in their public elementary schools // I was speaking of him only yesterday // Many people would say that Dostoevsky's short novel "Notes from Underground" marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature // Many people would say that Dostoevsky's short novel "Notes from Underground" marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature // 'What in the world could be more trivial than intimacy?' // For four years, the artist Taryn Simon travelled around the world researching and recording the stories of eighteen bloodlines // Hostess at virtually empty restaurant asks customers if they have a reservation, then types on computer, then seats them at table right next to the only other customers in the restaurant // When the new season of "Mad Men" began, just a few weeks ago, it carried with it an argument about whether the spell it casts is largely a product of its beautifully detailed early-sixties setting or whether, as Matthew Weiner, its creator, insisted, it's not backward-looking at all but a product of character, story line, and theme // It's no surprise that Busby Berkeley's most visually eruptive musical, "The Gang's All Here" (playing at Film Forum April 20-26), is a wartime movie (it was released in 1943) // When Wynton Marsalis wants to illustrate a point, he does it in style // Robert Gottlieb replaced William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker in 1987 // Date: May 14, 1812 // Writers writing about writers—in the wrong hands it's trouble, a failure of imagination or experience // One reason for my willingness to speak publicly on a subject for which I am sort of underqualified is that it affords me a chance to declaim for you a short story of Kafka's that I have given up teaching in literature classes and miss getting to read aloud // Psst, are you in the market for an hour-l;ong cable television drama about Washington politics and the media that covers it? // A couple weeks ago the folks at Cracked told readers that "living in a city makes you dumber." // This interview took place in the summer of 2003, at Tobias Wolff's home in northern California // I born in factory // The big loser in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll is...funny // The king is dead, long live the king? // I am a visual arts writer, and if I don't have anything nice to say, I don't say it at all // I am consumed by the Olympics // A recent study has found that playfulness—which includes having a "sense of humor," a "playful" attitude, or a keen and abiding love of "fun" — is among the most coveted traits // You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti // Aside from the fact that his name is right there at the top of the page, it's always fairly obvious when a "Shouts and Murmurs" piece in The New Yorker is the product of Simon Rich // If you're young and female, I hope you're introduced to a positive mentor early enough to build a strong sense of self-worth, because in 2012, American society still refuses to make it easy for you to maintain one // Eventually, we will realize that Mom has been feeling unwell for avery long time // When Dorothy Pitman Hughes was 10 years old, her father was beaten by the Ku Klux Klan and left for dead on the family's front porch in rural Georgia // It happened by degrees, a series of imperceptible gradations, slow and steady, asort of "Pcture of Dorian Gray" in reverse, or rather, in the natural order, wherein the picture stays the same but the man degrades // What can you say about someone who rewrites his sentences in dreams? // Despite the setting — a small stage filled with nine dancers — there was a feeling of separateness and sadness // Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones // Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he'd built out of metal pole in the yard // Twice already Marie had pointed out the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn, because the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn put her in mind of a haunted house—not a haunted house she had ever actually seen but the mythical one that sometimes appeared in her mind (with adjacent graveyard and cat on a fence) whenever she saw the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect etc., etc.—and she wanted to make sure that, if the kids had a corresponding mythical haunted house that appeared in their minds whenever they saw the brilliance of the etc., etc., it would come up now, so that they could all experience it together, like friends, like college friends on a road trip, sans pot, ha ha ha! // "Drip on?" Abnesti said over the P.S. //
// Near the end of her 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather serves up what is probably the most unsentimental betrothal scene in all western fiction // The pig sizzles on the spit, its eyes not so much blank as boiled // London: Mike and his wife and daughter, my wife and I, and a man called Richard Pratt // When I first heard Diane Arbus's voice, I felt as if I'd known it all along // That perfect letter // In a volume entitled The Best Creative Nonfiction, you are probably expecting work by the literary giants—Annie Dillard, John McPhee, tom Wolfe, Joan Didion—but instead you get Sunshine O'Donnell // Mary Anderson is fading, as surely as a forgotten Polaroid // From Scotland, for more than 125 years, the Gifford Lectures have been dispatched into the world owing to the behest and endowment of Adam Lord Gifford, a nineteenth-century Edinburgh advocate and judge with a passion for philosophy and natural theology
Sometimes one welcomes an excuse for not having to pay attention to everything // "Nothing ever changes" may be one of the truest things ever said // American universities crowd the tops of many world rankings, and though these ratings are basically entertainment for university administrators and alumni, they do reflect certain facts // Blue Nights is a haunting memoir about the death of Joan Didion's daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, at the age of thirty-nine, death from an infection that began just before Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack at the dinner table // Once famous for no more than co-hosting Singled Out, Chris Hardwick has reinvented himself in recent years as one of the internet's most premier nerd celebrities, consolidating a nexus of comedy, pop culture, and nerd nostalgia, nerdist.com // Until her suicide in 1971, photographer Diane Arbus made a career out of documenting "freaks" // There are two ways to describe Annie Proulx's memoir, "Bird Cloud," an account of her Sisyphean struggle to build her dream house on a remote and striking 640-acre stretch of land in Wyoming // Like almost everyone who was a teenager in the early 1980s, when the Music Television network first went live on cable, I wanted my MTV // Art Spiegelman's Maus, the most unconventional great book yet written about the Holocaust, the one that turned Nazis into cats and Jews into mice and Poles into pigs, turns 25 this year // Minot, ND -- There are four seasons up here, the joke goes: winter, winter, winter, and construction // In 1984, a young man named Malcolm graduated from the University of Toronto and moved to the United States to try his hand at journalism // In Montana, you need not go far in search of wounds // The statistics aren't that strong // One of the many small surprises of the recession has been a significant growth in the number of philosophy majors, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer // Tina Fey once confessed that she sometimes screams inside her head, "I'm a fraud! They're on to me!" // I first heard the phrase "impostor syndrome" from a telephone psychic // Like most of her friends, Hollis Romanelli graduated from college last May and promptly moved back in with her parents // If certain readers find John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection Pulphead lacking in thematic cohesion, it's only because essay collections // A Simple Machine, Like the Lever might be your journal // If certain readers find John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection Pulphead lacking in thematic cohesion, it's only because essay collections shouldn't have to be cohesive // An argument is not the same thing as a quarrel // Utilitarian architecture, German-influenced typologies, Grumpy Old Men, and a tedious trend in contemporary photography all pop up in Scott Peterman's minimal and reserved Photographs of New England ice fishing shacks at Charles Hartman this month // In 1999, I was a peon at a photography organization, charged with running the slide projector at the meetings where artists were selected for exhibition // Gus van Sant's last three films—Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days—were, shall we say, "demanding" works // Your enjoyment of Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins can be predetermined by one question: Do you think an obstacle course showdown between Martin Lawrence and Cedric the Entertainer sounds hilarious? // A documentary film is part stunt, part lab experiment, and the way a documentary filmmaker pursues his or her story will always involve a bit of amateur sleuthing, as well as improv // One notorious feature of the world of art historians is the fatal 'ism' - that process of compartmentalising the Western canon into easy-to-swallow packets // Martin Parr is to exhibit celebrity photographs from his own collection at the newly opened Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool at the start of next year // Unless you're in the middle of a desert or on the high seas, it is difficult to escape architecture // I started out reviewing for student newspapers: always a good discipline because it gets you used to writing to length and makes you instantly accountable to readers // The only rule: look, look again, and keep on looking // One of the hard truths about dance criticism is that you're on your own // The way I got started was simply gaining a background in writing and journalism // Not everyone will become an artist, but we all will be art appreciators and consumers // Few people will pursue careers as choreographers, performers or dance critics, but most will see dance in at least some of its many forms // Dance critics provide uniquely valuable documentation of the history of this elusive art form, a service no less important since the advent of videotape, film, and notations // The whole thing started with that movie // In the spring of 1959, a twenty-one-year-old Australian architecture student named Robert Hughes made his first visit to Rome // London in the early autumn this year felt much like a tale of two cities // When I read that an NYU professor was allegedly fired for giving James Franco a "D," I was shocked for several reasons // There was, for many years, a big photograph of Judy Garland by the late, great William Claxton duct-taped to the wall of the Barney's display studio where I worked // Journalists—certainly the smart ones—live with the question of veracity, and the question, always, of what makes a truthful account of anything // It is not entirely the fault of the recent movie My week with Marilyn—about Monroe's disastrous attempt to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier—that it is devoid of sex, which is something like depicting the life of Napoleon without mentioning that he was French // Some books make modest claims // Exhibitions of drawings by Leonardo, almost always based on the uniquely rich collection in the Royal Library at Windsor, are relatively common // Every election year brings vivid reminders of how money distorts our politics, poisons our lawmaking, and inevitably widens the gulf between those who can afford to buy influence and the vast majority of Americans who cannot // The future of contemporary dance lies in part in rediscovering its past in the rich history of classical ballet according to Edouard Lock, one of the country's leading contemporary choreographers // Burroughs documentary? // To construct a book on the work of an artist such as Bruce Nauman, which is diverse in thought, multilayered in meaning, and given to subtle richness of experiential exploration, requires considerable cooperation on the part of many individuals // The challenge involved in categorizing Bruce Nauman is related not only to the breadth of different media with which he works but to his persistence in exploring art as investigation of the self // Given the breadth of his career and the widespread recognition of the significance of his art, Bruce Nauman has conducted relatively few interviews over the course of the past thirty-five years // Mike Kelley, one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion, was found dead on Wednesday at his home in South Pasadena, Calif // The art produced during the 1980s veered between radical and conservative, capricious and political, socially engaged and art historically aware // This may sound familiar // Yesterday, Deadline reported that a TV pilot that Louis C.K. and Spike Feresten wrote 13 years ago had been resurrected // Ed. note: questions that have nothing to do with sex and/or relationships are always encouraged, too // Richard Aldrich's paintings defy a signature style but share a signature sensibility, a slack virtuosity that belies its interest in communication and self-reference // This group of artists, being deeply concerned with transposing pictorial issues onto anti-conventional mediums in a traditional manner, focus their attention on the creative processes for its own sake as compared to the representation of reality, pitting their various creative processes and attitudes against the concept of "abstract material" // It was a pleasure to burn // In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini // We know of hardly any painters who are born to their art already armed head to toe with their own technique, masters of their palette, touch, impasto, glazes // They used to tell a story about my father, who was a musician // i hadn't been thinking about los angeles before coming up here // This book was researched and written over the course of a decade and draws on a lifetime spent in dance // Richard Aldrich's solo debut introduces a committed but hardly monogamous painter // MoMA PS1 presents the first American museum survey of the paintings of Berlin-based artist Sergej Jensen // When children's television comes up in conversation, everyone knows the drill // The older I get, the more I'm convinced that a fiction writer's oeuvre is a mirror of the writer's character // A central motif in contemporary hip-hop is rapping about drug dealing by artists who may not actually sell narcotics // HBO has two new documentaries, each dramatizing a miscarriage of justice // New York may be a concrete jungle, but it does have some soil and sky // JD Souther, who is sixty-six, lives on a farm outside Nashville, and is most widely known for his part in writing sombre, elegiac songs that the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt made famous, such as "New Kid in Town," "Heartache Tonight," and "Faithless Love" // Last Tuesday, while Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney campaigned in Florida, Buddy Roemer walked toward Zuccotti Park // We like Foo Fighters // In the late 1990s, I taught Anglo-American law at Charles University in Prague // Philip Glass's place in musical history is secure // The monumental 1982 Keith Haring drawing Untitled is not often on view, so its inclusion in the Museum's current installation Contemporary Galleries: 1980-Now seems like an ideal opportunity to think about how this artist's iconic visual language fits into the larger story of 20th-century art // Over the past few years, Brian Kennon has emerged as one of the most active and generous participatns in the Los Angeles art scene // The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without // In 2007, my mother and I traveled to New York to see Vanessa Redgrave portray Joan Didion in "The Year of Magical Thinking" // My neighbor, a leadership development consultant who regularly helps improve themselves through personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, once told me I was the most introverted person he'd ever met // The best product always wins! // Can a brownie be too rich? // You’re Doing It Wrong is appearing on Tuesday rather than Wednesday this week, because it’s not just any Tuesday—it’s Shrove Tuesday, also known as Mardi Gras, also known as Pancake Day // The photographer Duane Michals, who turns eighty on February 18, pursues a distinctive approach to his medium that seems all the more remarkable today for being so resolutely low-tech // Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question "If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn't want us to know, can you do that?" // If there is any doubt that we're living in the age of the individual, a look at the housing data confirms it // If Edward Morris didn't show up to work, and you worked with him, it woud impact you in the following way: You would have to take the stairs // With talk of a military confrontation with Iran fast becoming the daily lead story in the international news pages, the average art lover's thoughts likely turn to Goya who began work on his infamous Disasters of War series two centuries ago this month // You better sissy that walk, girl! // Reality TV has the reputation of dehumanizing people, but my brief experience on it was to the contrary // Because my adoration for Whitney Houston is well documented, people have been offering their condolences to me, which is a little weird (it's not like I knew her better than anyone!) but entirely nice // Jed Martin, the hero of Michel Houellebecq's new novel, is the first of his major characters to make it to the end of a book without checking into a psychiatric ward or committing suicide // The late Portland-based artist Robert Hanson is not especially well known beyond the Pacific Northwest; this is due in large part to his unwavering dedication to figure drawing // In recent years, elected officials and policymakers such as former president George W. Bush, former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have agreed that there should be "no excuses" for schools with low test scores // What would it mean for a country to change profoundly? // In one sense, the analysts who forecast that 'peak oil'—i.e. the point at which the rate of global petroleum extraction will begin to decline—would be reached over the last few years were correct // The show of Renaissance portraits now on view in New York is of staggering beauty and revelatory importance // After meeting Bill de Kooning, one thing that first became apparent was that he had amazing skills of observation // When the trailer for Wes Anderson's latest movie, Moonrise Kingdom, arrived, it sparked a debate in the Slate office about whether Anderson needed to "grow up" // Since when did being a writer become a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders? // Interviewed after winning England's Costa Prize for Literature in late January, the distinguished novelist Andrew Miller remarked that while he assumed that soon most popular fiction would be read on screen, he believed and hoped that literary fiction would continue to be read on paper // In 1991, in need of change and disillusioned with what I perceived to be the art world's shallow relationship to sociopolitical issues, I enrolled at Hunter College // When the italian photographer Luigi Ghirri died unexpectedly at his home in Reggio Emilia in 1992, he had been working on two projects: a series of still lifes, and a series depicting the decaying houses of the Po Valley in the northern Italian province where he had lived most of his life // One warm evening in August 1937 a girl in love stood before a mirror // We're always fascinated with photographs of times gone by and so we were immediately taken in by these dusty images of young miners that we spotted over at Environmental Graffiti // Hollywood is a place where folks are often recognized more for their looks than their talent - and actress Hedy Lamarr was no exception // Cartooning is a solitary pursuit // Those of us who own pets know they make us happy // I know a lot of artists who get drunk a lot // Launching a play about Mark Rothko at the same moment that the art museum is hosting Portland's first Rothko retrospective is a strike of cross-promotional brilliance // One of China's most outspoken public intellectuals, Ran Yunfei was detained last year after calls went out for China to emulate the "Jasmine Revolution" protests sweeping North Africa // In his 2012 State of the Union adddress, President Barack Obama proposed that teachers should "stop teaching to the test" and that the nation should "reward the best ones" and "replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn" // In 1982, Mississippi senator John Stennis was chariman of the Armed Services Committee // Disjecta's Portland 2012: A Biennial of Contemporary Art is kicking into high gear // Oh my god, you have to tell your mother you said that // I have revolting childhood memories of fetuses // The Whitney Biennial has been called alot of things since it began, as an Annual, in 1932 // What is contemporary art? // I am watching a black man gyrate in front of me in a thong over gray briefs // "She could have been signed on the basis of her pedigree alone," said columnist Stephen Metcalf, talking about Whitney Houston on Slate's culture podcast Tuesday, four days after the singer's death // We lead busy lives and use our limited time as an excuse to procrastinate and avoid getting things done, but often claiming we don't have time is a lie // There was a time, not long ago, when I was busy, busy, busy // Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race // The viral seems to have a close cousin in the almost true // It's hard out there for a young person today // My reminders of Clark, who died nearly three years ago, are still visible, bust as my life adjusts to a world without him, I've moved a few things so they're a bit more out of the way // One phrase of the celebrated Martha Graham's which moves me is this, 'A body cannot lie' // Get your thesauras out (people still carry those, right? I mean dictionaries just GIVE you the answer), because the term for the day is 'collective movement' // Here's some facts // Oh man // The Hunger Games movie is so much better than it needs to be // Susan Orlean is proof that being the consummate narrative journalist doesn't conflict with becoming the consummate Twitterer // For anyone who can remember being floored by the mid-1980s Chrysler Sedan that warned "your door is ajar" in delightful monotone, it's still kind of thrilling that Cadillacs come with wifi these days // Just when you think all of the saddest uses for social media have been discovered, someone finds a way to do something even more depressing // I know I talk crap on being a twentysomething but I'm only half kidding // Is it the partially handheld camera or the partially handheld life that makes one woozy when watching the bold and talented Lena Dunham, whose much anticipated show, "Girls" will air on April 15th? // I was always told from an early age to be balanced in everything that I do // The age of the art critic as an unassailable voice of authority is long gone // I would like to tell you everything // Summing up the perverse brilliace that is the Daily Mail almost too perfectly, self-appointed attractive white lady Samantha Brick wrote a lengthy and self-pitying article about the 'downsides to looking this pretty' // The Christmas after I moved to New York, my mom gave me the complete DVD set of Seinfeld // All of a sudden, it's like you can't make huge amounts of money without people getting all pissed off about it // If you were a teen in the mid 90s and had cable television, most likely you know Michael Ian Black from The State, the sketch comedy show that aired on MTV // My first mistake was working at the mall, obviously // Everybody needs to calm down about Ryan Gosling saving me from a speeding car // The LA County's Coroner's Office has released the autopsy report regarding the death of legendary singer Whitney Houston // Black Mountain College is one of those places that almost everyone has heard of but few know much about, apart from the fact that Buckminster Fuller built a geodesic dome there, John Cage staged a'happening' and Merce Cunningham did a lot of dancing // Because I'm surrounded by artists in both my professional and personal life people often ask me what insights I've gained into the creative process // In February, Occupy Wall Street's Arts & Labor working group issued a call on the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) to stop issuing ads for unpaid internships // Can men and women be friends // From Leiter's blog, Michael Rosen (who wrote the excellent On Voluntary Servitude, a book I would write about if it weren't so dense that it'd require a huge amount of time to treat it) talks about academic strategies // Late-1914, an aspiring young writer named Max Fedder sent a copy of hi manuscript, "A Journal of One Who Is to Die," to Jack London, the author responsible for such works as The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and, most relevantly, Martin Eden—the bleak story of a young man battling to become a writer // And once again, I am late to the party // This morning (April 11, 2012), National Public Radio delivered a very well thought out human interest story with some in-depth research, but... one technical misunderstanding threw the whole story out the window. It all begins with a Civil War photograph from the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, a recent gift to the Library of Congress // With all the fanfare surrounding Lena Dunham's Girls, last night's premiere came as a bit of a surprise // If you didn't have your pesky ladyparts holding you back, you'd probably be rich right now // Today I'm headed to Columbia to take part in a symposium on the future of journalism—a subject that feels at once on some great cusp and under the weight of a myriad of conflicting pressures // Everywhere you look these days, there's a new "slow" movement // "I hate the guts of English grammar," E.B. White once famously proclaimed // In 1923, a prominent journalist bemoaned the death of the editor and the rise of the circulation manager as newspapers began grubbing for ever-more advertising revenue tailored their content around that goal, rather than around readers' best interests // It was in my late teens that I fell for Donald Barthelme // On our second trip together to Africa last Thanksgiving, we decided to go to the place where the deadliest war in the world was occurring: the Congo // The prosecutor wanted to know about the window coverings // You know what? // Dressed in a long sleeve black T-shirt and blue jeans, Philip Glass eases onto a couch in a corner room of his spacious Dunvagen studio // We're on the telephone, so I can't see Scrappers' face--but I imagine if I could, his eyes would be darting to and fro and his nostrils would be flaring // There is a yellowed newspaper clipping taped to the wall in the basement of the Berston Field House, in Flint, Michigan, that shows Jason Crutchfield with his arms in the air, winning the city boxing championship in 1983 // Among the many items on display at Obscura Antiques & Oddities, on Avenue A between Twelfth and Thirteenth Streets, is a leathery, somnolent-looking human head // Say you're a reasonably precocious high-school student in New York City and you believe a college admissions committee would take proper note if you were to make a short film in China featuring actors who, because they happen to be Chinese, speak only Chinese // When ESPN asked the National Football League, in 1980, if the network could broad cast its annual player draft, the league said, "Sure, but why would anyone want to watch it?" // The presidency of France's Fifth Republic is a monarchical role, shaped to the elongated scale and the grand manners first of Charles de Gaulle and then of Francois Mitterand // Before its format was gobbled up by television, in the early sixties, the revue was the bonne bouche of American musical theatre // In 1961, the director Shirley Clarke transformed Jack Gelber's Off-Broadway play "The Connection"—about a quartet of jazz musicians and their junkie friends waiting for their heroin dealer in a run-down loft—into a disturbing meta-movie // In the summer of 2007, Apple relased the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T.&T // Yes, there were slipups // I was in high school when I read The Bell Jar and thought it was about a lucky girl who wins a contest and gets to go to Europe // Life, said D.H. Lawrence, is a question of what you thrill to // Surprises abound in Jeanette Winterson's painfully candid and often very funny memoir of her girlhood in a North England household ruled by an adoptive Pentecostal mother—the "flamboyant depressive" Mrs. Constance Winterson // Talking to a class at the University of Mississippi one day late in his life, William Faulkner remarked that his cogenerationist Ernest Hemingway lacked courage as a writer, that he had always been too careful, never taking risks beyond what he knew he could do, never using "a word where the reader might check his usage by a dictionary" // In what U.S. city might you find an "alternative" art exhibition space on a 200-ton, 135-foot decommissioned crabbing ship? // Lately, there's been much conflicting news about autism rates // Leslie Sandoval doesn't remember much about the night his friend Seth Foster ended up dead and dismembered // Celastics was first trademarked in 1926 // We have all grown used to the idea that we should tell stories to children //
I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, and see it bound and tidy on my bookshelf, I will be unable to ever write about anything else // In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their teachers had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more complicated by fusing theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics // One reason it's sort of heroic to be a contemporary Expressionist is that it all but invites people who don't like your art to make an ad hominem move from the art to the artist // Right now it's Saturday 18 March, and I'm sitting in the extremely full coffee shop of the Fort Lauderdale Airport, killing the four hours between when I had to be off the cruise ship and when my flight to Chicago leaves by trying to summon up a kind of hypnotic sensuous collage of all the stuff I've seen and heard and done as a result of the journalistic assignment just ended // Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers // The year of 1922 famously saw the birth of High Modernism, mewling and puking as well as shining and sighing in Ulysses and in The Waste Land // Yvonne Rainer and The Village Voice go way back // Beyond the known forces conspiring to make a pigion of an honest editor these days—the bottom line, the top brass, slide shows of dogs, Rupert Murdoch—there is, lately, the added fear that when you say peculiar things to writers, they will put you on the Internet // Writers labor to make the visual world visible in fiction // What is literary criticism for? // A vignette from the campaign trail, circa March 2012: The Republican front-runner was taking questions at a town-hall meeting in Mahoning Valley, Ohio // At fifty-one, Fred has the fleshy body of a man who has spent most of his adult life in a cubicle // In a long letter from T.S. Eliot to John Quinn, dated July 9, 1919, one finds the following // Jean Cocteau's "Orpheus," from 1950 (at Athology Film Archives May 19-20), is a magical feast made at a time when magic was produced by nothing more than the malleability of the human body and by the (now peculiar) properties of the film medium, with its twenty-four still shots taken per second, which allowed directors to accelerate, slow, or reverse motion // John Douglas Thompson, who is forty-eight and regarded by some people as the best classical actor in America, has been acting for twenty years, following an epiphany he hd as a traveling salesman of computers, A.T.M.s, and check-sorting machines // I am in my bathrobe in the forest with my dog, Herman who is a German shepherd of unknowable age, because I refused to ever find out // Recently, I signed a lease with a major oil company allowing it to begin "cranial fracking"—deep drilling to tap the vast reserves of natural gas found in the human head // Surprises abound in Jeanette Winterson's painfully candid and often very funny memoir of her girlhood in a North England household ruled by an adoptive Pentecostal mother—the "flamboyant depressive" Mrs. Constance Winterson // Life, said D.H. Lawrence, is a question of what you thrill to // I arrive at Martin Creed's studio a few minutes before he does // As host of LA radio station KCRW's Bookeworm, Michael Silverblatt interview the most talked-about writers of our time—recent guests include Jonathan Lethem, Nobelist Orhan Pamuk, and Tao Lin—but it is his empathetic reading of the writers' work rather than the sheer wattage of the visiting leiterary stars that has made the radio program, now in its 20th year, the premier literary forum in America // We've been thinking it for two long years // Well // Like all good writers, Robert Walser was an inveterate borrower, at times wearing his influences openly // In recent years, there have been a few literary dustups — how insane is it that such a thing exists in a world at war? — about readability in contemporary fiction // The inner agony Edvard Munch felt when he feared losing his sight is to be explored in an exhibition which opens at London's Tate Modern this month, weeks after a version of his famous 1895 picture The Scream sold for a record EURO74m // It's great news that a Lucian Freud portrait has been given to the Tate // The young Italian artist, who participated in MOMA PS1's studio program ten years ago, returns to the museum for a mid-career survey // A hypnotizing sound overwhelmed the gallery, as if heralding an ominous event that never occurred // Alright, I'll say it // I can imagine all kinds of worlds and places, but I cannot imagine a world without Bradbury // Wes Anderson, god bless him, just keeps making Wes Anderson movies // A huge dock torn from a Japanese port by the 2011 tsunami has washed up 8,050 km away on the US West Coast after crossing the Pacific // No-one in China is lower in the pecking order than farmers and villagers // If you want to see someone who's miffed, then all eyes on me // Richard Long could have been named for his height: at 6 ft 4 he is craggily mountainous, with a giant stride and a pair of eyebrows that resemble bushes clinging to a rocky eminence //The first thing to say about artist's statements is that they're extremely hard to write; who wants to be an artist with one of those hanging over your head? // The tag project was begun as part of my research in preparation for my new series of work, Executive Order 9066; it is the first time I made the personal decision to really look at this sorry chapter in history as a Japanese American artist // It isn't easy to make money as an artist these days, but three crafty New Yorkers are managing to sell their work — and make a living — outside the traditional gallery system // "You have to love dancing to stick to it," said the late modern-dance giant Merce Cunningham — and given the grueling daily schedule choreographer Randee Paufve works, it's clear that she's one dancer-choreographer who does // Chefs (and the rest of us) often fantasize about what to pick for our last meal on Earth // Jillian Michaels catapulted to fame as the punishing trainer who got results on "The Biggest Loser" and "losing It with Jillian" // With the TV volume turned down, the woman in tank top and sweatpants seems diminuitive // In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend // I stood in a drafty living room covered in beer cans, overflowing ashtrays, and suspicious stains // For anyone who's ever suffered from depression or even some good old-fashioned self-doubt, it's nice to know that you're not alone // Readers of the Independent were in for a surprise this morning: a lengthy apology from that newspaper's star columnist Johann Hair, admitting to a plagiarism and the online harrassment of rival journalists (via pseudonymous assaults on their Wikipedia entries), and announcing that he was off to take a course of journalism training at his own expense // There is a distressing trend in film criticism // Near Christopher Street, in Hudson River Park, young gay and transgendered people of color sometimes hang out // I don't think I've ever seen a more spontaneously joyful performer than the young Spaniard Angel Corella // Ideal conversation should be a matter of equal give and take, but too often it is all "take" // If you're anything like us, you like a little quirk with your romance // As of Independence Day, 2012, forty-five of the fifty United States have adopted the Common Core curriculum in their public elementary schools // I was speaking of him only yesterday // Many people would say that Dostoevsky's short novel "Notes from Underground" marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature // Many people would say that Dostoevsky's short novel "Notes from Underground" marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature // 'What in the world could be more trivial than intimacy?' // For four years, the artist Taryn Simon travelled around the world researching and recording the stories of eighteen bloodlines // Hostess at virtually empty restaurant asks customers if they have a reservation, then types on computer, then seats them at table right next to the only other customers in the restaurant // When the new season of "Mad Men" began, just a few weeks ago, it carried with it an argument about whether the spell it casts is largely a product of its beautifully detailed early-sixties setting or whether, as Matthew Weiner, its creator, insisted, it's not backward-looking at all but a product of character, story line, and theme // It's no surprise that Busby Berkeley's most visually eruptive musical, "The Gang's All Here" (playing at Film Forum April 20-26), is a wartime movie (it was released in 1943) // When Wynton Marsalis wants to illustrate a point, he does it in style // Robert Gottlieb replaced William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker in 1987 // Date: May 14, 1812 // Writers writing about writers—in the wrong hands it's trouble, a failure of imagination or experience // One reason for my willingness to speak publicly on a subject for which I am sort of underqualified is that it affords me a chance to declaim for you a short story of Kafka's that I have given up teaching in literature classes and miss getting to read aloud // Psst, are you in the market for an hour-l;ong cable television drama about Washington politics and the media that covers it? // A couple weeks ago the folks at Cracked told readers that "living in a city makes you dumber." // This interview took place in the summer of 2003, at Tobias Wolff's home in northern California // I born in factory // The big loser in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll is...funny // The king is dead, long live the king? // I am a visual arts writer, and if I don't have anything nice to say, I don't say it at all // I am consumed by the Olympics // A recent study has found that playfulness—which includes having a "sense of humor," a "playful" attitude, or a keen and abiding love of "fun" — is among the most coveted traits // You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti // Aside from the fact that his name is right there at the top of the page, it's always fairly obvious when a "Shouts and Murmurs" piece in The New Yorker is the product of Simon Rich // If you're young and female, I hope you're introduced to a positive mentor early enough to build a strong sense of self-worth, because in 2012, American society still refuses to make it easy for you to maintain one // Eventually, we will realize that Mom has been feeling unwell for avery long time // When Dorothy Pitman Hughes was 10 years old, her father was beaten by the Ku Klux Klan and left for dead on the family's front porch in rural Georgia // It happened by degrees, a series of imperceptible gradations, slow and steady, asort of "Pcture of Dorian Gray" in reverse, or rather, in the natural order, wherein the picture stays the same but the man degrades // What can you say about someone who rewrites his sentences in dreams? // Despite the setting — a small stage filled with nine dancers — there was a feeling of separateness and sadness // Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones // Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he'd built out of metal pole in the yard // Twice already Marie had pointed out the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn, because the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn put her in mind of a haunted house—not a haunted house she had ever actually seen but the mythical one that sometimes appeared in her mind (with adjacent graveyard and cat on a fence) whenever she saw the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect etc., etc.—and she wanted to make sure that, if the kids had a corresponding mythical haunted house that appeared in their minds whenever they saw the brilliance of the etc., etc., it would come up now, so that they could all experience it together, like friends, like college friends on a road trip, sans pot, ha ha ha! // "Drip on?" Abnesti said over the P.S. //