History is what we write about our past—it’s the origin story a culture constructs for itself, from a variety of…
Blandgorgeousartsampler
It’s common for a bunch of artists to collaborate on a series, but Madi (as far as I know) has…
Shiny dance machine
It was the 1980s. We all had glossy hair, wore shoulder pads, and made music with the same three models…
Funny enough to be real
Black comedy crime dramas with inconclusive endings are almost a genre of their own now. The trick is to keep…
An uncertain consolation
Comic books are an excellent medium for non-fiction. This is not a novel insight—during the Second World War instruction manuals…
The good, the bad, and the oblivious
Watching John Ford’s acclaimed Western The Searchers gave me occasion to note how incomplete my education in cinema is, and…
Bonfire of the hierarchies
As a librarian, as a lover of history and the literature that constitutes it, as a custodian and celebrant of…
Sharing
Rachel Roddy’s second book is full of anecdotes and recollections, little narrative vignettes about her immediate household, the extended Sicilian…
Incoherent gold
Gold is a recurring symbol in American cinema, a useful stand-in when directors want to establish a dialectic between self-interest…
Clever joy
Nuria Martinez cultivates a self-consciously naïve cartooning style, but her sophistication as an illustrator, and her narrative facility as a…
Fragments of story
So much discourse and tale-telling has entered our small house through the tiny window of our television—no bigger than the…
Once upon a time in Canterbury…
Lots of regional music scenes have come and gone. Some we’ve heard of. We know that there were interesting things…
Thresholds
We cross thresholds, we readers. Each book we read is entered through a portal, and marking those portals—projected onto the…
Complexities of service
With The Caine Mutiny, Humphrey Bogart continued his drift away from movie-star roles, playing a part in which his character…
