Oh, I’ve been to Prague.
It was 1999, and I stood on the Charles Bridge and went to one of Kafka’s houses and drank the coffee and the beer (both of which were better over there, truly). And I thought it would cure me of my obsession with the movie Kicking & Screaming, Noah Baumbach’s Read More
David Fertig is a contemporary artist who lives and works in New Jersey, but his art is patently at odds with the here and now. His paintings, which are currently on display at James Graham & Sons, keep getting stranger. His fascinations are so singular that he could almost be mistaken for an outsider artist. Read More
When I read a good book—any good book, but especially a biography—I can’t help but suspect that its author is a charming person: a witty raconteur with, at bottom, a good heart. I would have adored Boswell, for instance. He was a drunk and a philanderer and a sycophant, but I daresay he knew it Read More
When I read a good book—any good book, but especially a biography—I can’t help but suspect that its author is a charming person: a witty raconteur with, at bottom, a good heart. I would have adored Boswell, for instance. He was a drunk and a philanderer and a sycophant, but I daresay he knew it Read More
Let’s get the kudos out of the way: Prague, The Crown of Bohemia, 1347-1437, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is yet another serious, authoritative and astonishing exhibition from an institution that seems incapable of mounting anything less. (Granted, the Met bumbles once in a while, but overall, its recent track record warrants Read More
Let’s get the kudos out of the way: Prague, The Crown of Bohemia, 1347-1437, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is yet another serious, authoritative and astonishing exhibition from an institution that seems incapable of mounting anything less. (Granted, the Met bumbles once in a while, but overall, its recent track record warrants Read More
1968: The Year That Rocked the World , by Mark Kurlansky. Ballantine Books, 464 pages, $26.95.
You can still find a handful of people (many of them now tenured) who will summon a nostalgic pang for the wild slogans spray-painted around Paris during the May 1968 student uprising. Overheated, purple paradoxes like “Be Read More
In what passed for news this summer, it was the season of bread and circuses, girl-in-the-well stories, sex in St. Patrick’s. But even corporate and shock-jock scoundrelism and blowhard columnists tilting at straw men couldn’t keep up with the sensational baby and animal photographs that dominated print and television. Freak-show humans alternated with cuddly and Read More
There was a time when it could rightly have been said of the Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) what W.H. Auden wrote in his elegy, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”: “if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, / to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of Read More
