“The last few years have witnessed many great changes in the commercial life of the Argentine Republic, and none more remarkable then the growth of the American community both in numbers and importance…American progress in the River Plate has reached… Continue Reading
The young man, wearing a black dress clasped tight against his ankles by the wind and silver stilettos that expose his unpainted toes to the same, complains as we walk of his uncertainly tucked junk, which is slowly and softly… Continue Reading
In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.” —Benjamin Boretz I. I found my record player on a spring afternoon, the day after my apartment was burglarized. The night before,I had come home to… Continue Reading
I was barely north of Waterville when my car started making the sort of desperate, wheezing noises that old, poorly-maintained vehicles tend to make when you ask way too much of them.We’d been going for hours, and the clattering old… Continue Reading
I distinctly remember the first time I saw Portlandia. Not Portlandia the TV show, or even “Portlandia,” the fantasy land that increasingly passes for my hometown of Portland, Oregon. I’m talking about the statue. Located atop the entrance to an… Continue Reading
The kitchen was in complete commotion. Everyone was running back and forth, kissing and chopping, dicing and dropping and generally making a mess. A girl with fiery red dreadlocks sliced cucumbers, tomatoes,and carrots on the rickety plastic table. A trio… Continue Reading
I can imagine it. The night of June 14, darkening, deepening, edging ever closer to the morning of June 15, ever closer to that witching hour. Dark shadows, robed shadows, gathering in the streets, assembling before fluorescent movie houses and… Continue Reading
There exists in a near-forgotten book a description of the Land of the Pomegranate. Its inhabitants are singularly marked by incest. Their progeny are either incredibly beautiful or remarkably repugnant.The beautiful are removed in infancy and placed in “The Garden… Continue Reading
I have never been to Newfoundland, but after a summer’s love affair with Annie Proulx, I felt as though I knew it, its craggy shores and rugged, weathered hands, the sheer breadth of its horizon. The Shipping News had occupied… Continue Reading
When I visited my parents for Thanksgiving, we went to our favorite movie theater. It plays art house movies, features an organ player before the show, and is decorated with very whimsical stars and angel statues on the ceiling. It… Continue Reading
It is late November in lower Manhattan, three days before Thanksgiving. At the Urban Outfitters in SoHo, beyond an entranceway strategically crackled with confetti, past a greeter, gaunt and sparkling from sleek beret top to sequined peep-toe shoe, a center… Continue Reading
Around 3 a.m. on a Saturday this May, I took the wheel from my friend Jordan and started driving across the Iowa plains. The sky above us was black and potent, and my windshield dappled with mist. Hidden clouds snuffed… Continue Reading
I am a teacher. For the past two years, I taught 11th-grade English in the Mississippi Delta, in Helena, Arkansas. What I found in the Delta was bleak yet gorgeous, largely significant yet unknown.Regardless of the art, of the music,… Continue Reading
There’s a remarkable video in which a couple of white guys, Belgians, I think, are hanging out in the rainforest waiting to make contact with a group of Papua New Guinea tribesmen. This is sometime in the late seventies. The… Continue Reading
The first time I ever heard of Terrence Malick was in a recorded lecture I downloaded off the Internet from the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. It was 2007, but I guess the lecture was from a few years prior, right after