Tag: Werner Herzog
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We The People – The United States of America at 250
The Unfinished We Today, the United States turns 250 years old. Officially, the occasion marks the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document by which thirteen colonies announced themselves as a nation. But an anniversary is never only a celebration. It is also an interrogation. It asks not merely what…
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Chapter 41: I Want You, I Need You, I Love You
On the morning of my twenty-first birthday, I’m woken by the boy, eager to show me his present. He pulls me out of bed and drags me downstairs.“C’mon, you lazy thing!” he laughs, hauling me through the kitchen, where Miss Mary has laid out a proper birthday feast.“Morning, sunshine,” she greets, opening the back door…
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The Culture Now: Lebanon
A country that keeps rebuilding its culture before it finishes rebuilding anything else There is a version of Beirut that exists mostly in retrospect — golden light, café terraces, a cosmopolitan capital briefly nicknamed the Switzerland of the Middle East. That version keeps reappearing in the culture discussed below, not as nostalgia exactly, but as…
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Chapter 40: There’s Always Me
The boy doesn’t pick me up at the airport, Red West does, driving the boy’s new car. I giggle when I see it: a lavender Lincoln Premiere, similar to my old Cadillac. “He wanted to be here,” Red tells me. “But it’s mayhem around him these days.”I pretend to understand. “Well,” I say, “it’s good…
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The Fire This Time: John Coltrane and the Music That Changed Everything
He played saxophone with the intensity of a man trying to resolve, through sound alone, questions that language could not reach. He was thirty years old before anyone noticed. He was forty when he died. In between, he remade jazz so completely that the music has never fully recovered — or needed to. There is…
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The Culture Now: Iran
In a country reshaped by war, censorship and exile, art has become the nearest thing to a free press There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from trying to describe a culture at the exact moment it is happening. The historian has the comfort of distance; the critic reviewing a single film or…
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A House in the Trees: Kristen Wiig’s Modernist Pasadena Retreat
954 Hillside Terrace, Pasadena, California There are houses that impress by arriving loudly, and others that seem to have grown into their site by degrees. The house at 954 Hillside Terrace in Pasadena belongs to the latter category: a 1965 mid-century residence folded into the trees of the San Rafael neighbourhood, where architecture, landscape and…
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Chapter 39: Summertime
The coursework is getting harder, so I’m being kept busy, and I can’t wait for summer to arrive. There are highlights, too. I go up to see Topper at Harvard when I can, and I visit Cornelia at Radcliffe as well. She’s found herself a boyfriend, a cute, scatterbrained boy with a soft heart and…
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Difficult Men: The Heroes of the Brontë Novels and What We Have Made of Them
Rochester broods. Heathcliff rages. Huntingdon drinks. The men of the Brontë novels have been romanticised for nearly two centuries. It may be time to look at them more carefully. By Bergotte There is a moment in Jane Eyre that readers have been arguing about since 1847. Edward Rochester, master of Thornfield Hall, has just revealed…
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Chapter 38: Trying to Get to You
Texas, 10 April 1956 Dear Birdsong, I’m flying around the country for personal appearances. I can’t begin to tell you about it, so I won’t! But I can promise you one thing: if you’re back with Miss Mary for your birthday this year, I will be too. I miss you, but you don’t seem to…
