Connect the dots, solve the riddles, uncover the conspiracies.
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The final paragraph of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold (1945) describes an uncanny scene that nicely limns the Cthulhu Mythos for those of us who may as yet be unfamiliar […]
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I had just removed his hand — gently, I hope — from my knee when the man in the off-white linen suit told me that he was the one who recruited Bob Dylan into the […]
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As a child, John Carrera was fascinated by the trove of yellowing pages of Webster’s Pictorial Dictionary he found beneath his grandfather’s chair. As a fine-press printer, he has painstakingly brought the book back to […]
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A cherubic angel heralds the advent of Minute Maid Heart Wise orange juice, which miraculously — note how the bottle glows — resolves the tension between thesis (“It helps lower cholesterol”) and antithesis (“It tastes […]
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I asked you to describe the ideal book, one that would save the publishing world and the public sphere in one stroke. And with responses pouring in — nearly three dozen of them — it's […]
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Listening to NPR yesterday morning for the first time in a month of Sundays, I caught the puzzle segment with Will Shortz. While Will and Liane engaged in their smile-weary repartée and my wife sorted […]
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A quick note about Neo-Dadaists and Pop Art. This item is excerpted from yesterday’s essay on the Postmodernist Generation. Neo-Dada artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Yves Klein were born between 1924-33. Reacting […]
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The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story about Spike Jonze, whose cultural productions — for two decades, at this point — have hovered uncannily around the edges of the four heimlich dispositions: […]
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High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Partisan Generation include: Albert Camus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clement Greenberg (whose 1939 Partisan Review essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” and 1953 Commentary essay, “The Plight of Our Culture,” are […]
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In today’s Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank wittily and intelligently notes that high-middlebrow pundits have whipped their ground troops up into a backlash against a highbrow (or, really, an anti-high-middlebrow) upsurge “that maybe should have […]
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The era of guilt- and consequence-free sex ended in 1982.
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Another postscript to Matthew Battles’ meditation on doodling. I originally wrote this item for Laylah Ali: 5 Responses to 5 Paintings, an exhibition brochure published by the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2002. *** Late […]
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Here’s a postscript to Matthew Battles’ terrific meditation on doodling. In this scene, Gary Cooper gives us all permission to doodle and otherwise be “pixillated” — another word that features importantly in Mr. Deeds Goes […]
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Preliterate, primordial, the doodle is at once the most common and the most ignored art form. And yet for all its primitivity, and despite its surely universal occurrence among the literate peoples of the world, […]
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In today’s New York Times Week in Review section, Mary Jo Murphy uses the 40th anniversary of Woodstock as a peg/excuse to air a few half-thoughts about a generational cohort born, she claims, between 1955 […]
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