But I Know What I Like
Painting is the branch of the arts in which I feel the sharpest division between what I admire and what I respond to emotionally. For example: I admire the mastery, the skillful re-creation of reality of the painting Ivy Bridge by J. M. W. Turner, and God knows I could never duplicate it. But, honestly, [...]
Two New Movies
Star Trek. (Yes, I have pop sensibilities, too.) I would put myself somewhere between a Trekker and someone who doesn’t know Kirk from Spock and thinks it’s all nonsense anyway — though a bit closer to a Trekker. Anyway, I thought it was a LOT of fun. Some parallels occurred to me toward the end, [...]
A Confession About Jazz
Years ago, as a young(er) man, I struggled to define my identity as both black and American. In the end I turned to jazz ,whose sound I loved, as a symbol of black Americans’ inventiveness and as a basis for a sense of cultural identity. (For a fuller treatment of this idea, see the essay [...]
Chester Himes
The comments on the previous entry, “The Unsung Hero of the 1970s,” reveal a divergence of opinion — to put it mildly — about the merits of Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye. (One commentor calls it “one of the greatest films ever made”; another writes that Altman’s crime film “was an actual crime in [...]
