June 22, 2017
Minor League Season Begins—Again
People asked Ron Shelton, again and again, if he was going to write a sequel to Bull Durham. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, and I’m glad he didn’t. […]
June 8, 2017
Women Who Like to Watch
Pop quiz: Do eggs look like breasts or eyes to you? It’s crucial to identify whether they resemble how we are seen or how we see. I got three double-yolked […]
June 28, 2016
In Bruges
We call them fairy tales because they exist in fantasy, in the revelation of the imaginative. A life is something lived, actively enacted; a tale something told. (From culture to […]
April 27, 2016
Other Inquisitions: Chasing the Northern Lights
…[T]he universe had no beginning. It existed forever as a kind of quantum potential before ‘collapsing’ into the hot dense state we call the Big Bang. Unfortunately many articles confuse […]
January 17, 2016
Temporary Passings/ Possessions: On Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Carlotta Valdes
“[The Hispanic] has this fear that she’s a dreamwork inside someone else’s skull . . .that if she digs into herself, she won’t find anyone. . . .” […]
November 16, 2015
Crash Davis, Soul Man
Bull Durham (1988) begins with grainy black and white stills of Willie Mays, Pete Rose, Babe Ruth, a ball club of women in three quarter sleeves and skirts, a woman […]
August 25, 2015
Sugimoto’s Movie Theaters
“Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?” The answer: “You get a shining screen.” […] One afternoon I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village […]
June 17, 2014
Sugimoto’s Darkness
You’re unlikely to find a more beautiful book than Hiroshi Sugimoto, designed by Takaaki Matsumodo. The book is cloth-bound in shadow-blue, with a slight sheen, only a shallow stamp of […]
September 18, 2013
Storytelling Now, or, Watching Movies at the Gym
At Eastern Tennessee State University, you can earn a Master of Arts in Storytelling. Located in Johnson City, Tennessee, “in the heart of traditional storytelling country,” the next town over […]
December 22, 2012
Language as an Artistic Medium
Visual art, language, and music fall along a spectrum whose two ends are the “representative” and the “nonrepresentative.” By “representation” I mean of the physical world. Historically, a visual art […]