My favorite thing is laughing so hard I have to lower myself on the wall to the floor to keep from falling down. I come from a family of gifted laughers. My brother Walter has an explosive, knee bent, leaning backward with hand over the heart, blow the house down laugh. It’s a rumbling that comes up from below, ricochets off the rib cage, pole vaults into falsetto that lifts him up on his toes, opens the sluices. And it’s water works for days. My daughter Karma as a little kid would complain, her palms like ear muffs, “Uncle Walter hurts my ears.” With an interruption of that sort, Walt emits a ahhhh-that-was-funny sigh. Then remembering how funny, he’s off again. Walt had a great teacher, our father.
Shadows: John Thompson’s Reckoning with Race
“BIG JOHN… BIG BAD JOHN” – Song lyric from my adolescence (that has escaped Google’s dragnet).
Former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson’s autobiographical account of his life and times I Came As A Shadow, written along with Jesse Washington, and completed just before Thompson’s death in 2020 at the age of 78 (2020), is a passionate, but sober paean to his parents’ teachings and love.
Rocky Mountain High
What easier target than John Denver, Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., Aspen’s poet laureate, that insipid 70s fauxkie whom if you turned on the radio you could not at the time avoid being made to hear or block from your sight on TV whether you tuned into the Grammys or the Muppets (and I know this, I was there), who would be singing about sunshine on his shoulders or being taken home along a country road, his senses filled up by his loving wife Annie (herself little more than a vehicle for the nature images Denver would summon to describe her, a night in a forest, a walk in the rain, a storm in the desert, a sleepy blue ocean—one heck of a relationship I guess), his “Rocky Mountain highs” presumably purer than Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way,” spiritual elevations delivered through nature’s bounty and domestic bliss, Ralph Waldo Emerson by way of Werner Erhard, but who we always suspected to be and later learned was (in part from Denver’s own autobiography, called what else Take Me Home) a celebrity stoner and cokehead (not that there’s anything wrong with that) who at one point in a mid-divorce rage chainsawed his beloved Annie’s bed in half. Easy peasy, a little cultural studies, a little Hollywood Babylon, done and dusted. I think there are other reasons as well why the above story is too easy.
Time and Skyline in Scorsese’s Stoic Epic
Framing the battle
The long narrative core of Martin Scorsese’s 166-minute epic Gangs of New York (2002) is bracketed by two highly stylized sequences — the first, a dystopian “once upon a time” inside a huge ill-lighted building, and the second, a cinematic dissolution of time in a Brooklyn cemetery.
Epiphany, and the Flight into Egypt
While quietly crossing the threshold from a most difficult year into a (hopefully) better year, I lit a simple fire in an old tire rim, and with Orion twinkling in the darkness above, I contemplated the religious icon that accompanies these words.
Grace and Gravity
Klay Day.
The Myth of Joan Didion
Joan Didion’s death last week was followed by an outpouring of praise stretching over a week in The New York Times. This raises a critical question. Was Didion really a great writer, or merely the vector of attitudes held by the commenting class? The answer lies not just in her most famous books and essays, but in a piece she wrote that has been overlooked by those who present her as a seer into the enduring meaning of the past.
Didion has been cast as a prophet of the present who “told the truth about America,” as one Times writer gushed. Well, she did tell a kind of truth, one that many sophisticated readers wanted to hear after the traumas of the 60s. Apparently, they still want to hear it. Her images of crazed violence resonate, for her admirers, with the current threat posed by the violent right. But this selective view of Didion’s work ignores the evidence that her dystopian gaze was usually a reactionary one.
Robert Silvers’ Legacy (& “The Fiery Lieutenant”) (Redux)
This essay on Robert Silvers–first posted here in 2017–ends with an invocation of Joan Didion’s essay on the Central Park Five. For that reason and others your editor has lifted it out of the archives to pair with Richard Goldstein’s No-in-Thunder to hagiographic responses to Didion’s passing…
Farewell Tour
I caught the 9:15 morning flight from JFK to Burbank, California. The purpose of this trip was to visit a place where a great friend had died and to see other old friends who were under attack by Cancer and age-related conurbations. I anticipated a grim but necessary experience. Since I’d begun to accept the notion of my own mortality, I wanted to know how old friends were facing the end of the line.
Gifts of the Spirit: Robert Farris Thompson on Basquiat and Haring
This Q&A with Robert Farris Thompson was originally posted at the Sotheby’s website in 2020, when the auction house was charged with selling paintings given to Thompson by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.
New York Ghazal
Immigrants, artists, tycoons seek New York.
Bloodstains from aborted dreams streak New York.
To friends from elsewhere, even the name awes.
Their eyes widen when I speak of New York.
Fickle city, we moth-fly toward your light.
You bless the rich, feed on the weak. New York
Great Days in Prince’s City (Julian White aka DJ Brother Jules R.I.P.)
The first time that my wife, Monica, and I stepped foot into Paisley Park, it was through an invitation from Julian White aka DJ Brother Jules who was Prince’s house DJ, first at Prince’s club Glam Slam and then for many years at all those renowned late night/early morning parties and performances at Paisley Park.
Toni Cade Bambara’s Memoir: An Excerpt from “Working At It in Five Parts”
Toni Cade Bambara’s “Working At It in Five Parts” is a hidden gem of prismatic self-reflection that we were surprised to find collecting dust in the Spelman College Archives along her voluminous letters, story drafts, teaching lesson plans, and much more.
The Last Irving
The café had four octogenarian Irvings. Two have passed; one is infirm. The fourth, now 92, sat on a bench outside the Cheese Board. We spoke of every day being a blessing, of every hour.
“Succession’s” Essence
There is no unhappiness quite like that of a Legacy Media Family. Such is the premise of HBO’s Succession. At the heart of the show is Logan Roy (a very leonine Brian Cox) and his four children, the most viable candidates to take over leadership of the publicly-owned but family-run company called Waystar Royco, a conglomerate of business ranging from cruise lines to motion picture production to cable news. The Roys are miserable, especially when they are all together, and they are always together—insulting, undermining, and threatening each other with little reserve or discretion. They find the savage fun in dysfunctional, and many of us could not wait for the show to return after a long Covid-19 hiatus.
The Starry Sky Above and the Moral Law Within
Dear friends and family,
Recently I happened to come across the question as to whether it is possible to care too much.
Hanging out with Horses (in the 80s)
THERE WERE A HALF-DOZEN wonderful family shots in our batch of holiday Polaroids — but so far I’ve had eyes for only one picture in the pile. It shows Tom, our older boy, and my wife holding a horse, with James, our grandson, in the saddle, steadied by myself, Granddad. A New Yorker, 3 years old, James hasn’t been on a horse before. He’s looking at the camera, not at us, or at Terence — Terence is the horse — but what is his expression? I keep coming back to the shot, trying to read James’s face. Is he enjoying himself? Is he the kind of kid who, a bit older, will think it’s cool — or whatever they will say then — to spend a horsy summer in the Berkshire hills?
“My Heart is in My Ears”: Listening to Jekalyn Carr (et al.)
“Get in your right posture!” Per Ms. Carr as she wails and falls down for her savior. God knows we should all take a knee for her — and her Sister Charisse. (I hear that Youtube commenter: “Why ain’t nobody talking about how ms charisse killed it. lord her voice is heavenly.” No doubt! She made Jekalyn JUMP!)
Jekalyn Carr and Ashley Charisse Mackey are major but they’re not too far gone from the small storefront church in Roxane Beth Johnson’s verse…