Wednesday, November 09, 2022

photo | wolfgang tillmans | window/Caravaggio

 

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Saturday, November 05, 2022

new yorker index

Orphan's Progress, short story by Mavis Gallant
Oliver Sacks, The Case of Anna H. 
Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars Temple Grandin
Calvin Tomkins, Cooking With Julia Child
Anthony Lane, The Battling Memoirs of the New Yorker, May 5, 2025
John Bainbridge, Texas, the Super-American State, Mar 4, 1961
Old 88 (vintage crime) 

Current
*
Land of the Flea (people selling used stuff) 
FICTION: Autobahn
Zach Hefland, The Best Fake Books Made Real | Feb 3, 2025
Palisades Fires | Sep 22, 2025
Merve Emre, The History of Advice Columns | Jun 16, 2025

Film


Richard Linklater's Uncompromising Artists (Blue Moon & Nouvelle Vague)


The Exacting Magic of Film Restoration | Sep 22, 2025 | Anthony Lane

Marvel: Michael Schulman, How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood | Jun 5, 2023
Robert Redford, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Rudd, and Angela Bassett now disappear into movies whose plots can come down to “Keep glowy thing away from bad guy.”

Mean Streets, Pauline Kael


Filmmakers

Nora Ephron, Moving On: A Love Story | May 29, 2006

Richard Linkater's Uncompromising Artists (Blue Moon, Nouvelle Vague) | Sep 27, 2025
Martin Scorsese: Mark Singer, The Man Who Forgets Nothing | Mar 19, 2000

on Christian Marclay

Daniel Zalewski, The Hours | Mar 4, 2012
portrait of Christian Marclay

Daniel Zalewski, Night Shift With "The Clock" | Mar 13, 2012
Yes, I have seen all twenty-four hours of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”

Meghan O’Rourke | Is "The Clock" Worth The Time? | Jul 18, 2012

Music, Art, Books

Joan Acocella, Graham Greene's Dark Heart | Mar 22, 2021

Rachel Aviv, Alice Munro's Passive Voice | Dec 23, 2024

Whitney Bailliett, links to her pieces on jazz musicians

Ed Caesar, Seize the Night | Oct 3, 2022
Solomun, The DJ who rules Ibiza 

Kaitlin Flanagan, Becoming Mary Poppins: P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the making of a myth

Adam Gopnik, The Dragon's Egg | Nov 27, 2011
JRR Tolkien, "the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. 

John Lahr, Sinatra's Song | Nov 3, 1997

Sarah Larson, Ira Glass Hears It All | Jul 8, 2024
Interview about This American Life

Anahid Nersessian, How Jane Birkin Handled the Problem With Beauty | Sep 15, 2025

Ian Parker, The First Rule is Not To Lie | July 4, 2022
Emmanuel Carrére writes his way through a breakdown

Claudia Roth Pierpont, Tough Guy: The mystery of Dashiell Hammett | Feb 3, 2002


Paul Rogers, Paul and Audrey | Feb 8, 2021

Joshua Rothman, The Church of U2 | Sep 16, 2014

Peter Schjeldahl, When A Museum Feels Like Home | Feb 8, 2021
As a tyro critic in the nineteen-sixties, I fell for the works in the Frick one by one...

Michael Schulman, On Succession, Jeremy Strong Doesn't Get The Joke | Dec 5, 2021

Parul Sehgal, The Key To Me | Jan 3&10, 2022
Fiction writers love it. Filmmakers can't resist it. But the trauma plot is wearing thin.

Photography

Alex Prager, Los Angeles Dreaming | Sep 9, 2019

 Peter Schjeldahl, The Shock of Robert Frank’s “The Americans” | September 10, 2019

Hashem Shakeri, Ghost Towers: The view from Iran's housing crisis | Oct 21, 2019


Faith

Ken Auletta, The Man Who Disappeared | Jan 6, 1997 [archives]
At one time, a whole generation of Times reporters wished they could write like McCandlish Phillips. Then he left them all for God.

Casey Cep, The Quiet Revolution of the Sabbath | Sep 30, 2023

Vinson Cunningham, Personal Jesus | Jan 4 & 11, 2021
What Thomas Jefferson did to the gospels

Adam Gopnik, We're Still Not Done With Jesus | Mar 24, 2025

Lauren Boersma Harris, What Can Conversion Memoirs Tell Us? | Dec 24, 2025

David Owen, Promised Land | Feb 8, 2021
A young climate activist is creating maps to help the Catholic Church combat global warming


Personal History & Profiles

Tad Friend, Men of Letters | Apr 18, 2022


Rachel Kushner, The Hard Crowd | Jan 18, 2021
Coming of age on the streets of San Francisco

Ben McGrath, The Undead | Jul 12 & 19, 2010
Big Papi's late innings 

Al Pacino, Early Scenes | Aug 6, 2024

Akhil Sharma, Wide World of Disney

Dorothy Wickenden, Late Harvest | Feb 28, 2022
Wendell Berry profile

Short Stories

Colin Barrett, A Shooting in Rathreedane | Dec 6, 2021 

Lauren Groff, Annunciation | Feb 7, 2022
story | 

Lauren Groff, To Sunland | Jul 4, 2022

Patricia Highsmith, The Trouble With Mrs Blynn | May 19, 2002

Greg Jackson, The Hollow | Nov 29, 2021

Gish Jen, Detective Dog | Nov 22, 2021
story | audio | 

Ian McEwan, A Duet | Aug 1, 2022
author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach

Thomas McGuane, Take Half, Leave half | Oct 10, 2022

George Saunders

Jim Shepard, The Queen of Bad Influences | June 16, 2025

Miriam Toews, Something Has Come To Light | Aug 25, 2025

Alejandro Zambra, Skyscrapers | Aug 22, 2022
Chilean writer, set in Santiago

Humor

Robert Carlock, Letter of Resignation | Jul 25, 2022
Dear Global Liberal Cannibalistic Pedophile Conspiracy...

Ian Frazier, Coyote v Acme | Feb 19,1990

Carlos Greaves, Script of Every Movie Set in Boston | Oct 25, 2023

Jay Martel, Disappointing Near-Death Experiences | June 13, 2022

World

Anand Gopal, The Other Afghan Women | Sep 6, 2021

Elizabeth Kolbert | Poles Apart: How Politics Got So Polarized | Jan 3&10, 2022

Joshua Yaffa | The Swamp | Nov 4, 2019
Ukraine's leader pledged to end corruption. Then Trump's people called

Photos | Families Flee Ukraine | Mar 7, 2022

Bits

Kyle Chayka | Tiktok's Favorite Camera | July 10, 2024
The Fujifilm X100 

Adam Elder | The Lou Gehrig of Beer Guys | Apr 1, 2024


Ferris Jabr | Why Walking Helps Us Think | Sep 3, 2014

Helen Rosner, On the Phenomenology of Cheeseburgers | Jan 18, 2026

Joshua Rothman | Should You Just Give Up? | Oct 8, 2024


Writers

Peter Schjeldahl, The Outlaw (William S. Burroughs)


Mirror World: How William Gibson makes his science fiction real | Dec 16, 2019

Dorothy Parker, The Artist’s Reward | Nov 23, 1929 (Ernest Hemingway)

Football and the Fall of Jack Kerouac | Sep 6, 2013


New York

Old John's Diner, upper west side
Golden Diner, lower east side | Oct 18, 2019

The rise of the sport as we know it was centered in Gotham, where big stadiums, heroic characters, and epic sportswriting once produced a pastime that bound a city together.

Adam Gopnik, The New York Shooting That Defined An Era | Jan 12, 2026 on Bernie Goetz

Joseph Mitchell, Street Life: Becoming Part of the City | Feb 3, 2013
Joseph Mitchell | McSorley's, the Oldest Irish Saloon in the City | Apr 14, 1940
index to pieces by Joseph Mitchell 

Jordan Orlando, The Once and Future MOMA | Jan 26, 2020
Peter Schjeldahl, Rehab: The Museum of Modern Art Enlarged | Oct 14, 2019

Christmas

"American Christmas,” first published in 1965, includes both classic and nearly unknown works, and widens a reader’s sense of what the holiday might mean.

Miscellaneous

BOOKS: Suspense in the New Yorker | Jun 6, 2017

Daniel Alarcon, Trailblazers | Nov 22, 2015
Men in Blazers "BlazerCon" 

New Yorker Radio Hour, Another Fiasco for American Soccer | Jun 8, 2018
Interview with Roger Bennett 

Jerome Groopman, The Resistance
Can science help us change our habits?


Joshua Rothman, Becoming You | Oct 3, 2022
Are you the same person you were when you were a child?

Joshua Rothman, Is Life A Game? | Jan 9, 2026
In “The Score,” the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen argues that play is the meaning of life.

Ann Patchett, How To Practise | Mar 1, 2021
"I wanted to get rid of my possessions, because possessions stood between me and death."


Andrea K. Scott, Video/Art: The First 50 Years | Feb 14, 2020
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Friday, November 04, 2022

saint sebastian | "only a flesh wound"

 


Giovanni Bellini's "San Giobbe Altarpiece", Venice (detail)

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poems | katrina steckle


at my grandmother’s kitchen table
I watch the birds with my grandfather

there are pies baking in the oven
dutch (deutsch) apple and raspberry custard 
(my favourite, my grandmother knows)

my grandfather names the birds
gold finches, red breasted woodpeckers

we feed the orioles grape jelly 
made by my grandmother

there are less orioles
than last year


The LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground.
The LORD remembers that we are dust.

my grandfather 
above all else 
is a gardener 

despite aging knees
and aching back
my grandfather
continues to garden

my grandfather
awed by plants
grows new varieties 
every year
shares knowledge
and produce
lives open minded 
and open handed

my grandfather
has lived on this land
all his life
he has cared for it 
and it has cared for him

for the first time
my grandfather 
has reduced 
his garden
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Monday, October 31, 2022

photos | tom balke | pocket photo

 


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Friday, October 28, 2022

ray givans | journey in a sidecar...

 


from Earth Works, by Ray Givans, Tony Martin illustrations

(Lewis's transformative journey to Whipsnade Zoo is usually dated Monday, September 28th, 1931, rather than the 22nd. The famous midnight conversation with Tolkien and Dyson occurred the night of Saturday September 19th into the early hours of Sunday September 20th.  On the Monday one week later, September 28th, Lewis's brother Warnie records in his journal "Today the family paid its long projected visit to Whipsnade Zoo after the usual Kafuffle which seems inseparable from a family outing in our house...")

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Thursday, October 27, 2022

michael kopsa : a tribute


The Pacific Theatre community is saddened by the loss of Michael Kopsa, who died at one o'clock last Sunday morning. He got a cancer diagnosis a couple years ago, ended up living much more life than the doctors or anyone else expected, but about two weeks ago he was admitted to hospice, and early on October 23rd he left us. 
 
Michael was a huge presence, both onstage and off, filled with an appetite for life, an intensity, and a passionate engagement with people and things that made him a remarkable actor and an unforgettable friend. He painted in oils, he played blues harp, he was a skilled carpenter, an incredible father to his daughter Nora - he met her mom, the incomparable Lucia Frangione, at Pacific Theatre - and, of course, he was one of the most unforgettable actors to inhabit our stage.
 
I met Kopsa in the spring of 2001. ("Kopsa." Michael was one of the only people in my world I always referred to by his last name. Why on earth? I don't know. Almost like there was a mythic quality to the guy - as human as I knew he was.) Gina Chiarelli had told me there was an actor, new in town, who I had to meet, who might be good for Pacific Theatre. So he and I booked a lunch. It was a demanding, stretched-thin time at PT, though I can't remember why, and I was coming to terms with the likelihood that I couldn't afford the time to act in Hospitality Suite that fall, playing the biggest-personality-in-the-room Larry. (Kevin Spacey's character in the film version, The Big Kahuna.) Just before lunch that particular day I was working at the photocopier, by the office door. And I looked up to see this guy come around the corner and head down the hall toward me, and I thought, "Well, I won't be playing Larry this fall." Before he'd spoken a word. 
 
Now, I will say that I would have been fine in that role. More than fine, I would have made a meal of it. But the only reason I feel compelled to put that out there is because once you saw Michael Kopsa inhabit the part, you couldn't imagine anyone else doing it. Kevin Spacey would hang his head if he'd seen Kopsa live that role, command the theatre, take his place among the best and most powerful actors in our city. 
 

From that time on, I watched for ways to have him back on our stage, wedged in between his film, TV and voice work, and shows at other theatres. I very much wanted to act with him, and he was eager to work with director Morris Ertman and Hospitality Suite cast member Tom Pickett, so he ended up in a role he felt uneasy in, the jaded professor Christopher Riley in Shadowlands. I think he felt like a hefty man squeezed into an uncomfortably undersized tuxedo, and was always self-deprecating about his work in that show. Ha! The play opens with an extended talk on suffering by my character, C.S. Lewis, and night after night, Kopsa challenged and prodded and dismissed and counter-argued through the entire speech -- without saying a word. I imagined I was speaking to an audience of Oxford dons and students, but every word was really addressed to Riley, with his intensity of focus and sharp, skeptical mind. I didn't walk out on stage to deliver a speech; I entered a boxing ring, faced with a heavy-weight, and every word and phrase had to be sharp, forceful, precise, if it were to have any impact on that formidable adversary. Michael doesn't have to say anything to fill a room.
 
I know, it all sounds terribly blown up and fanciful. But that's what it can be like inside an actor's head, that's what fires a performance, and without fail Michael's own blaze lit that fire in his fellow actors. How many of us did our best work opposite that incendiary presence?
 
In an era when women have taken their rightful place in the world of theatre, Kopsa was an unmistakably male presence; his booming voice coming down the theatre stairs in the midst of a chaos of men's voices at an audition sparked the decision to stage a reading of Twelve Angry Men, in which he was of course magnificent The next spring he played three very different men in PT's production of The Woodsman. Again, the self-doubt: "I'm not a character actor, Ron. I only do one thing. Sure, the cop, but the other two guys? You need a chameleon." Morris and I talked him into it, and he brought it: the policeman, the social worker, and the brother, all full-blown, vivid, distinct. He could always deliver much, much more than he thought he was capable of.


A few days before PT's production of Playland opened, I went in to take archival photos of the show. The very first day of rehearsal, the table reading had been potent, just two actors and a script, Tom Pickett and Michael Kopsa in Athol Fugard's searing story of a confrontation in a broken-down midway on the edge of the South African plains as the end of apartheid approaches. It felt as though they could have stood up from the table, changed clothes, and opened the play that night, it was that powerful and fully realized. But two and a half weeks later, as I entered the theatre space with my cameras, director Anthony Ingram pulled me aside; "See if you can say something to Kopsa. He can't stand anything he's doing, and doesn't think we can open." Or something to that effect, dire and self-doubting. 
 
Well, if you saw the show, you saw what I saw that day through the camera lens - both men were astonishing. I know I'm describing all these Kopsa performances in superlatives, but... Michael was always superlative. Bigger than life, but utterly true to life. Impassioned, vivid, forceful, gifted. Balanced with the deepest humility - a humility that too often tipped into self-doubt and self-deprecation, but kept him human and humane. 


Kopsa played Satan himself, in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Was ever the destroyer of our souls more charming, more winning, more charismatic? And funny! One day in rehearsal he made his big entrance wearing a dapper little Hitler moustache, his eyes lit up, daring anybody to laugh. And we did. He took it off, "Of course I'm not going to do that in the show," but the director insisted, and he kept it, and what a moment that was! Night after night. Audacious, inappropriate, hilarious, inspired - and he wasn't sure he should do it. I'm tempted to say that that one outrageous choice won him his Jessie, but it would diminish everything else. I have NEVER witnessed a scene more electrically charged, more true, more virtuosic, more heart-sickening and tragic, than when Michael Kopsa and Bob Frazer square off in Bathsheba's Bar and Grill, and a cold, calculating Satan claims the soul of the self-loathing Judas. I watched it from the wings every single night, and when the run was over, grieved that I would never see it again.
 
And now we face the reality that we will never see Michael again. At least, not on a stage. But I hold out a hope... 
 
The reason Gina sent Michael my way, twenty-one years ago, was not only that he was the actor that he was, but also because that man was as hungry for God as he was for all of life. At university back East he had fallen in among the Jesuits, gotten involved in some drama things they did, and now that he had moved to the coast, his insatiable appetite and curiosity led to spiritual conversations with Gina. And then with me. And with so many others, over so many years.
 
There was a restlessness to Michael, an unsatisfied quality, that kept him searching and striving, rather than settling and being certain. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, for they shall be satisfied." I do expect I'll see Kopsa again. Maybe I can even talk him into another show. Maybe a reprise of that time he played Satan. I sure hope so. I bet all of heaven shows up to see it. 





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Sunday, October 23, 2022

the honorable john mcsorley pickle, baseball nine, and chowder club


Old John maintained that the man never lived who needed a stronger drink than a mug of stock ale warmed on the hob of a stove. He was a big eater. Customarily, just before locking up for the night, he would grill himself a three-pound T-bone, placing it on a coal shovel and holding it over a bed of oak coals in the back-room fireplace. He liked to fit a whole onion into the hollowed-out heel of a loaf of French bread and eat it as if it were an apple. He had an extraordinary appetite for onions, the stronger the better, and said that “Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies” was the motto of his saloon. About once a month during the winter he presided over an on-the-house beefsteak party in the back room, and late in life he was president of an organization of gluttons called the Honorable John McSorley Pickle, Baseball Nine, and Chowder Club, which held hot-rock clambakes in a picnic grove on North Brother Island in the East River. 

Old John had a remarkable passion for memorabilia. For years he saved the wishbones of Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys and strung them on a rod connecting the pair of gas lamps over the bar; the dusty bones are invariably the first thing a new customer gets inquisitive about. Old John decorated the partition between barroom and back room with banquet menus, autographs, starfish shells, theatre programs, political posters, and worn-down shoes taken off the hoofs of various race and brewery horses. Above the entrance to the back room he hung; a shillelagh and a sign: “be good or begone.” On one wall of the barroom he placed portraits of horses, steamboats, Tammany bosses, jockeys, actors, singers, and assassinated statesmen; there are many excellent portraits of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. On the same wall he hung framed front pages of old newspapers; one, from the London Times for June 22, 1815, contains a paragraph on the beginning of the battle of Waterloo, in the lower right-hand corner, and another, from the New York Herald of April 15, 1865, has a single-column story on the shooting of Lincoln. 

from The Old House at Home, by Joseph Mitchell
The New Yorker, April 13, 1940
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Thursday, October 20, 2022

photo | rosa on a swing (thanksgiving 2022)

 


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Sunday, October 16, 2022

raymond mah's son | northern cafe

 


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Saturday, October 15, 2022

sarah ens | from 'un/settling: 1948–'

 


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Friday, September 30, 2022

kurt vonnegut | do art and do it for the rest of your life


Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

 

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don't make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana. 

 

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

 

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you're Count Dracula.


Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

 

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals [sic]. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

 

God bless you all!

 

Kurt Vonnegut

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Monday, September 05, 2022

photo | bertrand carriere | they all just went away

 


photo by Bertrand Carriere
illustrates They All Just Went Away, by Joyce Carol Oates


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Thursday, September 01, 2022

emmanuel carrere | the adversary


On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal.

the opening of The Adversary, by Emmanuel Carrère
quoted in The First Rule Is Not to Lie
The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2022
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Tuesday, August 30, 2022

muriel nissen | churning around in the dregs

 


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Wednesday, August 24, 2022

ikigai / not ikigai

 

*   *   *



Often referred to as the ikigai diagram, the ikigai chart or the ikigai symbol, the Venn diagram above is not the ikigai concept. What you are looking at is the Purpose Venn Diagram. The framework does not accurately represent the concept of ikigai. Japanese don’t follow this framework, nor contemplate the four questions when they think about their Ikigai.

Ikigai Westernised

  • Are you doing something that you love?
  • That the world needs?
  • That you are good at?
  • And that you can be paid for?

The misconception being perpetuated is that one can only achieve ikigai and true happiness by meeting all four conditions, so if you are doing something you love, but it isn't generating you money, then you haven't achieved ikigai - this is false. If you were to show this Venn diagram to a native Japanese, they would not recognise it as ikigai.

Your Ikigai:

  • isn't something you need to make money from
  • doesn't have to be something that the world needs
  • isn't something that you have to be highly skilled or proficient at
  • isn't something you have to necessarily love

Japanese use the word casually in conversation and understand its meaning and nuances, but don’t make it up to be a grandeur concept of any sort. You could call the Venn diagram a Westernised version of ikigai, but the truth is, it is a misrepresentation of ikigai. Your ikigai does not lie at the center of those interconnecting circles.

The Zuzunaga Venn Diagram of Purpose

Full credit for the Venn diagram of Purpose should go to Spanish author and psychological astrologer Andres Zuzunaga, who created it in 2011. It first publicly appeared in the book Qué Harías Si No Tuvieras Miedo (What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?) by Borja Vilaseca in 2012. The diagram was translated into English and then started being used by HR managers and life coaches as a simplistic overview to finding purpose in your career. It is now used to help people create a more balanced work situation. Personally, I actually think it makes a very accurate visual representation of entrepreneurship. If this framework inspires you, motivates you, gives you a sense of purpose and makes you want to get out of the bed in the morning, then keep using it. Just remember, that it's not an honest representation of ikigai.  Your ikigai can be anything from simply taking the time to enjoy your morning coffee to catching up with old friends to working towards a life-defining goal.

Ikigai Is Not About….

It’s not about making money.
Ikigai is not the pursuit of professional success or financial freedom. Most Japanese would not associate making money with ikigai. Success and the accumulation of wealth could be a by-product of your ikigai, but it would not be the focus.

It’s not what the world needs from you.
Ikigai is not about what the world needs from you. Ikigai lies in the realm of community, family, friendships and in the roles you fulfill. When you pursue your ikigai, you are not out to save the world. It is more about connecting with and helping the people who give meaning to your life - your family, friends, co-workers and community.

It’s not about what you're good at.
You don’t have to be good at something to find your ikigai. Ikigai can be a very simple daily ritual or the practice of a new hobby. Ikigai is more about growth rather than mastery.

It’s often not about what you love.
Ikigai can be something you love or are passionate about, but you can find ikigai in areas of your life you would least expect. Ikigai is more about living your values and finding meaning and purpose in daily living regardless of what constraints you may have.

from ikigaitribe

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