How can you not love ice dancing? I’m back after a week of visiting a tropical isle where my only form of mental exertion was figuring out how to bash tennis balls back in the general direction of their origin without having to stop sipping on my rum drinks. I couldn’t quite get it right … Read more
—Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1953 –Zellar, Basement Window, 2005 Monsieur Centrine was a fierce proponent of impossibility. That’s not to say he was one of these characters who will insist that anything is possible. Quite the contrary, in fact. Mssr. Centrine believed that life, the world, and every aspiration of the human heart represented a thoroughly … Read more
I was not much surprised to read Chris Hitchens over at Slate, defending his friend Bernard Henri Levy from Garrison Keillor’s scurillous review of American Vertigo. While Hitch wins points for style as ever –“turkey-wattled congressmen” and “the Homer of Middle America”, he shoots, he scores!–I have to say that he almost entirely missed the … Read more
If you’re looking for real life –whatever that is– I’m afraid you’ll have to go somewhere else. This is all in my head. There’s nothing real here. These are merely the words that roll down my fingers in the middle of the night as I wait for the light to come fetch me. Some of … Read more
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, o God, thou wilt not despise. –Psalms, 51-17
How many words do you think you can run through your head in a day? It all depends on how many words you have in you, am I right? Images, though, they’re something else; they represent a bigger, more universal language. All you need to do is look around and keep your eyes open. Yet … Read more
I always wanted to be the gun on the table in the first act. I always wanted to be the mysterious stranger arriving in an unfamiliar town with a sack full of magic corn. I always wanted to be the troll who lived under the bridge and the wise old man on the mountain. I … Read more
For the last week I’ve been mucking around in this little magazine I picked up in a junk shop somewhere. The thing is called Reason, and it’s subtitled “A Monthly Journal Devoted to Psychic Science, Education, Healing, Success and Social Reform.” Come now let us reason, it says on the masthead. The issue I have … Read more
If you haven’t stumbled upon this site yet, you should check out MNstories.com. Every day a new short video with some connection to all of us. Yesterday was a cat, today is The Red Tail, a short from a longer film about Northwest Airlines. One line from the MNstories excerpt struck me: “If we can’t … Read more
Harry Siegel, the still bedewed editor of the New York Press has resigned–along with his entire staff, after being ordered not to publish “those comics.” He’d been on the job for something like six months. In his public statement, he makes a cogent argument from the farther reaches of journalistic idealism. Not a lot of … Read more