“What do you think?” says Joni, an hour and a half into Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue. “I think you gotta come on the stage right now,” says Bob, sexy and imposing. “OK, I’m coming.”
Culturewatch
Big Thief: Not Another Brooklyn Band
Big Thief is an alt-folk band from Brooklyn, but their spirit isn’t tied to that place. Usually, “Brooklyn band,” scares me off.
Fires in the Night (A Sequence from “Candy Mountain”)
Robert Frank’s magnificent picture of kids with sparklers on the beach reminded your editor of night scenes near the end of Candy Mountain–the 1987 road movie directed by Frank along with Rudy Wurlitzer. (Forgive the German subtitles!) Click “Read more” to see a bigger screen. [P.S. THE EMBED HAS BEEN IFFY – IF THE MOVIE STARTS AT THE BEGINNING, CLICK ON AROUND 1:22.50 TO GO STRAIGHT TO THE NIGHT.] B.D.
Armacord (From Nabokov’s “Speak Memory”)
Vladimir Nabokov—another exile on Main Street like Robert Frank—left us with visions of childhood worthy of Frank’s. Here’s the final passages from the last great pages of Speak Memory where Nabokov—speaking directly to his wife Vera—evokes their son’s European childhood under “the shadow of fool-made history…”
A World Without Borders
I just wanna feel myself, you want me to kill myself
Art & the Collective Idea
Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism (Reaktion Books, Ltd. London, U.K. ) By Mary Ann Caws. Hardcover, Summer 2019, 352 pages. $35.00
Future’s So Bright I Need VR Goggles
I still feel the hunger after all these years. The pangs spark at the strangest times—as attention wanes at co-worker’s oft-told story; ascent 302 of the thousand times I climb my apartment staircase, moments of confusion amidst a girl’s mixed signals. I want to go back to that safe, warm, strong place of my childhood. I want to play video games again.
Back to the Future
First is reposting (below) what Nathan Osborne wrote in November 2017 after the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs.
The Thing (A Month of Facebook Posts)
July 5: Stop reporting on the Thing as if he were a real anything.
Radical Conservatism: Thinking Through V.S. Naipaul’s Haters and Counterparts (Pt. 2)
Part two of an essay that starts here.
In part one of this essay, I quoted a passage from Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas where he invokes Caribbean city streets inhabited “by people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them.” Such devotion was inconceivable to Naipaul. The life of Fr. Rick Frechette brings home the limits of the novelist’s imagination.