This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The tenor of this blog sort of troubled me, half cooking stuff and half random longer form thoughts on TV/Pop culture that didn’t really fit over on my Tumblr.
So I decided to put that sub-domain feature back to good use. Any and all baking/cooking posts will be over on Raincoats and Recipes. Update your blog checking software accordingly.
Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on try it. The Magic Flute versus Middlemarch? Middlemarch in …
Will a time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean more than fifty-fifty chance, that …
On Thursday I went to see the Sweedish version of “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” As the owner of the theater said in his curtain speech (yes, the Arts Cinema nearby features an old man who does a curtain speech before every show, it’s adorable) the U.S. version will probably take this adult thriller and …
Here’s the thing – just like everyone else I have a bit of a Martha Stewart aesthetic desire. In theory – my life would look like this. or (from Design Is Mine) But in reality, I fear that I wouldn’t actually be able to live like this. That one perfect dress on that bare white …
“The smell of pantries, the sense of empty afternoons, the feel of things as they rained across our skin, things as facts and passions, the feel of pain, loss, disappointment, breathless delight….this is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.” Don DeLillo, White …
“We know more about what Huey Long represented and the emptiness at the core of American political culture from reading Robert Penn Warren than from contemporary journalistic accounts of Long’s reign. We know more about human pride, purpose, and obsession from Moby-Dick than from any contemporaneous account of the Nantucket whaler that was actually struck …
Maybe you’ve seen the promos for Undercover Boss calling it the #1 New Show. Maybe you’ve seen the ratings. I’ve been mocking those promos mercilessly. I couldn’t believe CBS chose to give this show the post-Superbowl slot. Then last night I got sucked into an episode at the gym. I found myself feeling the same way about …
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, …
(Image from ABC.com) I actually really enjoyed that episode of Lost on Tuesday night. It felt for the first time that we were actually getting somewhere. Questions answered rather than just more questions. But the whole Richard episode, at every moment when he declared over and over again how much he wanted to live – …
