When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people -- Salman Rushdie Fritz Lang’s M (1931) – the enigmatic letter of the film’s title stands for the elusive figure of the serial child murderer Hans Beckert, whom we are not supposed to see fully revealed until the film’s dramatic denouement when Beckert, played by Peter Lorre, kneels in front of the viewer, confessing his irrational deeds and venting his desires and anxieties. There ...

I know somebody whose husband invested all his savings with Bernie Madoff. Imagine that plot twist: you discover one day, by reading the paper, that you'd exchanged the product of years and years of your luck and labor for a few nonsensical annual reports. Now you start over again, from zero, at age 45, assuming you have a job. Hearing this story moderates my urge to complain. I get monthly statements showing shrinking balances, and still have...

We spend a lot of time doing it. Phenomenologists could stock their whole shelf of examples with the experiences of waiting. How better to understand the “intentional object,” the concept that got the whole business rolling with Brentano? In physical terms, you might just be sitting around, but experientially speaking, you are waiting for something, and that something gives your sitting around a shape: a horizon, a tension, a pull ...

Everyone who comes to New Haven should stop at least once at the Duncan Hotel on Chapel Street. It is one of the city’s oldest curiosities and landmarks-- along with York Pizza with its old photographic displays of the juvenile sportive herds of would-be presidents in tight football pants (some of them signed by real presidents) and the used record store Cutler’s with its unique, first-hand photographs from the Black Panther trial era. All the...

With Sex in the City and Indiana Jones duking it out for the title of post-Memorial Day weekend box-office champ, mowing the lawn has had a tough time attracting America's entertainment dollar this summer. And those of us wearing white pants from now through Labor Day know that grass stains resist the dulcet labors of Oxy-Clean far more vigorously than blood or chocolate.

One of the few good things about moving, which I otherwise abhor, is that it gives you a chance to clean house, to take stock of your accumulations and sort out the clutter. Because we’ve moved so much in the past ten years, we’ve managed to divest ourselves of much of the kind of junk that can usually pile up unnoticed in the backs of closets and in basement storage spaces. This puts us at a disadvantage at white elephant parties when a truly...

This past weekend, I celebrated my 39th year. “Celebrated” is too strong a word; “acknowledged” might be better; “begrudgingly acknowledged” more accurate still. I’ve never been one to regret my vanishing youth or bemoan my advancing age. But then again, I’ve never been so close to 40 before, that cultural milestone, the marker of the zone of life called “middle age,” the seedbed of intense anxiety for youth-obsessed America.

Originally the medium of film was expected to have scientific potential, as photography had with Muybridge's motion studies. Michael Apted's 7 UP series is one of the few films I know of which has tried to realize that potential. It is an epic documentary, like Shoah or The Sorrow and The Pity. Apted's series follows the lives of a disparate group of British schoolchildren as they grow up, returning to interview them every 7 years. The lat...

The lights went up on six guys in dark suits and black hats, looking like a high school production of a western saloon scene. The short one standing in front of the keyboards was the singer. His suit had a tuxedo stripe of midnight blue glitter and the brim of his hat was ringed with silver medallions. As they roared into their first number, his voice came on abrasive and overpowering like the forgotten smell of aftershave on my father's ro...

No big travel plans this summer. No airplane tickets or passports needed. But we’re leaving for our third road trip to visit family. E Hayot has written before about the strange delights of train travel, which I can appreciate, but when it comes to domestic travel, my ‘druthers are with packing up the car, getting behind the wheel, and hitting the road.

A strange feeling comes over me when I see the Chevy Lumina van. Is that what they thought the future would look like?

When the weather and my schedule become more forgiving, I go in to work on my bicycle, about thirteen miles each way. The trip starts in a rural-suburban zone (pick your own apples, chiropractor, first cut good hay, bunnies for sale), goes past some patches of commerce (gas stations, power mowers, consignment furniture, convenience market, Agway, tavern, Our Lady of Pompeii) intermixed with older farmhouses and brand-new boxy big houses with d...

I was at my 15th year college reunion this past weekend. I haven’t been to any previous college reunions, and since my mother moved a couple of years ago to the town where I went to school, I thought it’d be convenient enough to attend this year's and satisfy my curiosity. Even that last sentence betrays the deep ambivalence I feel about maintaining my connections to my alma mater. And it may be a stretch to say I attended my reunion, since I...

I’m behind on a deadline. So far, the consequences haven’t been, and aren’t likely to become, fatal, but it’s on my mind. As many academics --and no doubt many in other professions-- already know, “deadline” is used pretty loosely these days, often indicating something more akin to a goal or preference than to the absolute the word implies. Merriam Webster’s gives for the primary definition of “deadline”: “a line drawn within or around a priso...

Exactly a week from today, my sweetie and I will have been together 10 years. That’s a long time in Hollywood, but far from impressive on any marriage longevity scale, I realize. In fact, it’s not even that we’ve been married for 10 years (it’ll be 7 years this August); no, next week is the 10-year anniversary of our first date. Still, a decade together is a nice milestone, something not to be taken for granted, and although we don’t celebrat...

This has been an odd winter, to say the least. The temperature has swung wildly from the low 30s back up to the high 50s or 60s and then back into the chilliness. Yesterday it got up to the high 70s, but then the winds came to push the warm air out and pull the cold air back in. That’s the way it’s been—one windstorm after another. Other people seem to enjoy the unseasonably warm weather, but it worries me. I’m not one to complain about warm...

(Read my previous entry on Ruscha here. ) Ed Ruscha’s “Course of Empire” is a revisiting of previous works, both his own and another’s: First, the title of the exhibition is borrowed from a series of five paintings from the 1830s by Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole called “The Course of Empire.” These paintings are part of the New York Historical Society’s permanent collection. At the Whitney, reproductions of the paintings are mounte...

As an Angry Young Man my New Year’s resolution was not to make any resolutions. This seemed clever at the time. The crankiness about the resolution ritual was in many ways related to a crankiness about the holiday formerly known as Christmas (which, amazingly, seems to have endured one more year, despite the vast conspiracy against it). It wasn’t that I found wishing for peace or giving gifts to loved ones inherently worthy of disdain, but tha...

In 1969, a young British woman named Vashti Bunyan recorded a modest folk album called "Just Another Diamond Day." About 25 years old at the time, she had dropped out of art school at Oxford to try to become a pop singer, hooked up with the Stones' manager and released a few decent singles that went nowhere, including a Jagger-Richards cover. I thought Vashti was a Hindu name, but it is in fact an Elamite name from the Book of Esther. Queen ...

One month everything I downloaded sounded like something else; I’d struck the Eighties Revival. This whole album sounded like Echo and the Bunnymen, that track like Simple Minds with a little Pixies thrown in. I was downloading Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, The Futureheads, but instead of the future I was hearing echoes from the past. Soaring vocals over shimmering chords. Keyboards up front, electronic and proud. Distortion lightly sprinkle...