They were young, they were beautiful, they were consumed by their own myths and their own fevers before any of them reached forty. Byron, Shelley, and Keats between them invented the idea of the artist as hero — as outcast, visionary, martyr to beauty and freedom. The invention was magnificent and partly fraudulent and changedContinue reading “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: Byron, the Romantics, and the Heroic Pose”
Category Archives: Aesthetics
Leonard Cohen & David Bowie
Essay · Music & Ideas Two Ways of Dying in Public Leonard Cohen and David Bowie both knew they were dying when they made their final albums. Both kept the knowledge largely to themselves. Both produced, from that knowledge, work of extraordinary quality that addressed mortality directly and without evasion. And there the similarity endsContinue reading “Leonard Cohen & David Bowie”
Ovartaci
Essay · Art & Lives The Chief Loon and the World Inside the World Ovartaci lived for fifty-six years inside a psychiatric hospital in Risskov, near Aarhus, and made, in those fifty-six years, approximately a thousand works of extraordinary formal intelligence and phantasmagoric density — paintings, drawings, sculptures, mixed media pieces built from whatever materialsContinue reading “Ovartaci”
Eddie Murphy
Essay · Comedy & Culture The Force That Arrived at Nineteen Eddie Murphy is the most naturally gifted comedian America has produced in the second half of the twentieth century, and the case for this claim is not primarily about the films, though the films at their best are extraordinary, and not primarily about theContinue reading “Eddie Murphy”
Riding in Cars with Boys
We drove back to Los Angeles the next day. It was one of those sunny days suspended in time. We both knew something in our story had ended, and neither of us understood that something else had already begun. When I said goodbye to him at his hotel, I pretended it was nothing. We didn’tContinue reading “Riding in Cars with Boys”
Chapter 66: Two Sleepy People
The next day is a blur. I remember it, but not in sequence, more as flashes: the harsh white of the desert light, his profile against the windscreen, the dust kicking up behind us, the sunset and the moonlight, the feeling of being both very young and already used up. It’s odd, because in theContinue reading “Chapter 66: Two Sleepy People “
The Human Condition According to Dostoevsky
By Bergotte The series has been moving, in its way, toward this. Homer gave us mortality without consolation. Ovid gave us transformation without stability. Dante gave us love as the architecture of the universe. Shakespeare gave us the self as performance, unmoored from any fixed ground. What Dostoevsky gives us is the consequence of allContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Dostoevsky”
Chapter 65: Come Fly with Me
By the time they put me through to the boy’s suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I’ve already crossed the country and felt Cornelia’s words rearranging themselves inside me. The desert is only a few hours away. I want one last stretch of sky with him before everything changes, just a few days bathed inContinue reading “Chapter 65: Come Fly with Me”
Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1969
Essay · Music & History Four Days on Max Yasgur’s Farm Woodstock was not what it was advertised to be. It was not three days of peace and music — it was four days, the weather was frequently terrible, the organisation collapsed almost immediately, the food ran out, the sound system failed repeatedly, and atContinue reading “Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1969”
Chapter 64: Houses and Rooms Are Full of Perfumes, the Shelves Are Crowded with Perfumes
Topper is back in Georgetown, and I’m about to return to Los Angeles. “I need to wrap things up with Mr Woolf,” I tell everyone, and it’s true. I do need to drive over to thank him for his time and give him a parting gift, a Baroque French clock I picked up at auction.Continue reading “Chapter 64: Houses and Rooms Are Full of Perfumes, the Shelves Are Crowded with Perfumes”
My World of Interiors 