This weekend, I plan to attend the new, mammoth Edward Hopper exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I’ll be going with friends—which may not be entirely apt, given the common image of Hopper as American painting’s poet laureate of loneliness. To me, the image seems accurate enough: Hopper imparts mystery and even a [...]
Archive for the ‘Reflection’ Category
In the Hopper
Posted in Reflection on 17 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Same Page Next Week
Posted in Books, Reflection on 15 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
For a while now, the editors of the New York Times Magazine have been contracting well-known fiction masters to write serialized works whose carefully doled-out segments, presumably, will give readers a spot of relief from reports on Darfur and advertisements for lingerie. This past Sunday, the magazine published the first chapter of an art-heist caper [...]
Maintenance Charge
Posted in City Life, Reflection on 11 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
This week, in its “Innovators Issue,” the New Yorker reviews a book whose gist is that innovation isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. The true power of a technology, argues David Edgerton, author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, often emerges from the way people use it [...]
All Things Must End
Posted in Reflection, Television on 9 May 2007 | 1 Comment »
That (“All Things Must End”) was the tagline for the final season of the HBO series Six Feet Under. Used in that context, the old saw cut brilliantly in two directions: In its fifth season, the show itself was coming to an end; and the show, throughout its run, treated death as its core theme. [...]
Suspicious Character
Posted in Reflection on 3 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Why do I sign the entries in this log as “The Obelist”? For that matter, what is an “obelist”? Taking the latter question first, I note that the word appears in no standard dictionary. Not at Dictionary.com. Not Merriam-Webster Online. Not in the Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, that squats on a shelf in [...]
Mixed Company
Posted in Reflection, Travel on 2 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Three standard ingredients at a wedding reception are dancing, photography, and alcohol. To succeed, a wedding reception should include no more than two of those ingredients. And one of the included ingredients must be alcohol.
I formulated that nostrum this past weekend at a Marriott Resort hotel in the exurban wasteland north of Chicago, where I [...]
Gateway
Posted in Reflection on 23 April 2007 | Comments Off
The photo used in the header to this Web log, at least in the form in which I launch the site today—a scene of the Golden Gate Bridge as captured from the Marin Headlands, with the towers of San Francisco inscribing a dim palimpsest behind the inevitable fog of the Bay—is a visual cliché. Too [...]
