 Notes from a barbarian at the gates of culture.
By Morgan Meis |
Trunk Show Interest in Weinergate isn't prurient — or new. The struggle between reason and passion has captivated us for centuries.
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Old Men in New York In New York's Draft Riots, Herman Melville saw Man being Man.
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How Now, Red Cow? Franz Marc looked into the eyes of a cow. He saw something there.
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The War Within David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion reveals a life lived honestly.
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A Room with a Point-of-View What's real: the Met's rooms, or Katrin Sigurdardottir's recreation of them?
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Body of Work Art Smith married art and craft on the neck.
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| Artist Unknown They say the man in the portrait is William Shakespeare. But will we ever truly know?
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Floored If this Roman mosaic floor from Lod, Israel could talk!
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News Stand One benefit to a world hooked on oil and gas? Al Jazeera.
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Word Writing is a spiritual act. In a 14th-century Quran, words have an extra burden.
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Black Beauty Ad Reinhardt wanted to remove all painterly elements from his paintings. Nice try!
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Leak Soup The details of the WikiLeaks dump aren't as important as the refreshing feeling of truth they provide.
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A Blessing Nathaniel Hawthorne is an antidote to Thanksgiving triteness.
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Presidential Art I was about to write off the Bush portrait as kitsch, but the more I looked at it...
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Medieval Woman How do we make sense of Hildegard's 12th-century poetry in the 21st?
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A Real Problem When Mario Vargas Llosa needed to escape, he turned to Victor Hugo for help.
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The Late Shift ''Return of the Herd'' captures the force of this in-between season.
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Film at 50 You can try to interpret La Dolce Vita, or you can just let it happen.
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| Monster Movement For Art Nouveau, the modern city was an extension of the natural world. For Jean Carriès, that extension was a malignant tumor.
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| Couture Is Dead Yves Saint Laurent was a genius of giving and then taking
away. And when he was finished, perhaps so was high fashion.
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Matter of Fact Sometimes material things are just material things. Caravaggio was a fan of such harsh naturalism.
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Summer Reading You realize first that you're alive, and then that you will die. Not bad for 78 pages.
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Independent Streak The Declaration of Independence balanced revolution and prudence, ushering in a new American prose.
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Foot Doctor Would that you could mount, frame, and exhibit Lionel Messi's goal in the 2007 Copa del Rey.
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Ladies' Choice Women of the Hudson River School are not often remembered. It's a shame, because Mary Blood Mellen sure can get the light right.
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Balancing Act Guru might be gone, but Gang Starr's ''Just to Get a Rep'' feels like it'll be around forever.
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East Meets the American West You think you know what Yosemite looks like, and then a new cultural lens comes along.
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Sweating the Small Stuff The funny thing about miniatures is how they're physically small, and yet overwhelming expansive.
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Well That's Just Grate' The Grateful Dead iconography is on display at the New York Historical Society. Heady stuff...
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Indian Winter Alwar, India is the dreamy home of sleeping dogs, algae-covered pools, and typewriters.
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Nether Nether Land The Dutch get shafted in the stories we tell of the country's origins, so kudos to the New York State Museum.
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Sloppy O You think the masters take exacting care with everything they make, and then you watch Orson Welles' The Stranger.
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Flaking Out Wilson A. Bentley's photographs of snowflakes create a kind of yearbook for winter, the crystals alike and not.
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That's My ''Story'' and I'm Sticking to It James Cameron doesn't care about plot, but neither did Muybridge. Such is mind-blowing filmmaking.
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Marley and Me I say, Bah! Humug! to the plot of A Christmas Carol. But God bless Dickens' writerly tricks.
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Lend Me Your Ear Unlike the private letters of most great persons, Van Gogh's illuminate the man behind them.
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Line Reading Transcendence to a godly non-place seems an unlikely goal for an illustrator, but that's Blake for you.
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Local Forecast Nature is mechanistic in its functioning, but speaks to us in feelings. Take the weather.
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Old Haunts ''The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'' — a bridge between the old myths and the ones yet-to-be-written. Oh, and good for Halloween.
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| Peep Show What makes Marcel Duchamp's ''Étant donnés'' erotic? It can't just be the nudity...
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| Defining Moment Is a dictionary meant to describe or prescribe? Samuel Johnson, who's turning 300, knew the answer.
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The Naked Truth It's not the scale of The Naked and the Dead, but the minutiae of its characters' thoughts and actions.
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| Housing Authority Dan Graham's photographs in 'Homes for America' celebrated the Minimalism not of the gallery, but of the new landscape.
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| The Straight Talker Leszek Kolakowski's "Conservative/Liberal/Socialist": short, bold, brilliant.
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True Story The book based on John Edwards' mistress isn't exactly a biography, but it's still a more honest life story than most.
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Surf's Up Bob Bogle has died. As one of the founders of surf music, he did what few musicians can.
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| Art or Bust The oldest sculpture ever discovered is a 36,000 year old woman with really big boobs. Is anyone surprised?
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Style Mavens You can have rules and principles and Elements, but good writing just has a certain...je ne sais quoi.
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Into the Sunset What do people want played at their funerals? AC/DC, Meatloaf, and this quaint little weather report theme.
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Court Papers The Iowa Supreme Court opinion on gay marriage is a surprising read, as far as judicial opinions go.
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Lords of the Ring The power of When We Were Kings is not in Ali's knockout, but in the meet-up of two irreconcilable worlds.
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| Holy Smoke The Holy Mountain — as confounding as a Matthew Barney film, but a lot more charming.
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Money Talks Joseph Schumpeter wouldn't be worried about the state of the economy — he'd be eating it up!
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Punk'd Sid Vicious died 30 years ago this month. As his version of 'My Way' shows, dude was serious.
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Homesick Ceci n'est pas a crippled woman lying in a Maine field, trying to reach a farmhouse on the top of a hill.
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First Impressions For Clement Greenberg, appreciating a work of art was like loving a person: You can't explain why you do.
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It's a Rap If there were doubts about rap in the early '80s, Run-DMC's 'Christmas in Hollis' erased them.
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Reality Check The protagonist of E.T.A. Hoffman's 'The Sandman' can't go home again. Could you if you discovered your lover was a robot?
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Axis of Evil The Night of the Hunter is a fairy tale gone horribly wrong.
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Meet Me in the Art Museum The schizophrenia of 'Saint Louis in 1846' began with westward expansion, but endures today.
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Music Therapy Leonard Cohen's 'Hotel Chelsea #2' acknowledges an ugly world, then gets on with being beautiful.
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Pool Boy Summer wanes, but there's time enough left for a dive into David Hockney's pool.
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| Notes From a Barbarian Asking “Why?” must become a more personal affair. Let's start with the poetry of Catullus...
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