Art
Letter from Paris: Socialism and I Return
Having sold my lovely apartment in Paris two years ago, I returned last month feeling like a tourist rather than the part-time resident I was for so many years. It’s all in the head—but then Paris is a state of mind as well as a glorious destination. Just ask Woody Allen. MORE...
The Man Who Might Have Been
Here in Chicago, baseball season has opened in disappointment. As new Cubs manager Dale Sveum has learned, no matter how good you once were, it’s tough to be the manager of a big league team. But it’s tougher still to manage at the lowest rung of the minor leagues, A-ball. And that’s where Edward Everett Yates ("Double E") finds himself, making a career out of managing the smallest of the small town teams in Joseph M. Schuster's first novel, The Might Have Been. MORE...
Mexico City Redux
This March, Forbes magazine named Mexico's Carlos Slim the richest man in the world for the third straight year. The Mexican BMV (Bolsa Mexicana de Valores) stock index Mexbol hit a record high. The Pope came to visit––five days after an earthquake registering 7.9 on the Richter scale hit (without any major damage or loss of life). And the 2012 "quiet period" before a three-month campaign leading up to the July election of a new Mexican president came to an end. It was well past time to go visit my favorite city in the Americas: Mexico City. MORE...
Marriage: For Better or For Worse
Marriage - that personal, sacramental, traditional institution which, despite centuries of battering and unraveling, seems to have avoided the scrap yards of obsolescence – is now flourishing anew. Amid all the excitement over same sex unions, two new books by award-winning American novelists came out almost simultaneously last fall that illustrate how complex these unions can be. MORE...
BOOKS: It’s Complicated
"It's complicated." So goes the ubiquitous rejoinder to inquiries about most everything from the war in Afghanistan to the Eurozone meltdown…even to a difficult marriage. But as "The Submission", the debut novel by Amy Waldman about a memorial design competition for New York's 9/11 site, so remarkably illustrates: it really is complicated. MORE...
The New Art Examiner Re-examined
I came to Chicago from London just a few months after the ’68 riots to take a position as an art instructor at Chicago State College. The 60’s were in full swing. American life seemed dynamic and exciting, a roller coaster ride from the troughs of racism and anti-war sentiment to the heights of Utopian thinking, and art in America reflected all the twists and turns of this fast-paced culture. MORE...
Holden Caulfield, Move Over: 60 Years After Catcher in the Rye
In this 60th anniversary year of the quintessential New York teen angst novel "Catcher in the Rye", Jesse Browner's new novel Everything Happens Today not only updates Holden Caulfield, but – dare I say it – bests Salinger with a funnier, kinder and wiser novel. MORE...
BOOKS: One Good Read
Before everyone crafted a new life on the internet - whether an evolving profile on Facebook, a portfolio of pithy tweets, an avatar on Second Life, a Tumblr blog or Flickr gallery; some people created an alternate persona in paper diaries and scrapbooks. In her newest novel, Stone Arabia, National Book Award nominee (Eat the Document) Dana Spiotta focuses on two siblings in their late forties whose facsimile lives ("chronicles" as both call them) make school girl diaries look like…well, school girl diaries. MORE...
BOOKS: Bottom of The 33rd
My baseball book of the year is not just a baseball book; but then, no baseball book is just about baseball. Baseball contains all there is of our lives – our hopes, our dreams, our disappointments, our errors, our ennui, our strike outs (both swinging and looking) and our occasional hits…all played out under an eternal clock where "theoretically, just one at bat could last forever, with foul ball after foul ball spinning into infinity, like a never-ending decimal measure of pi." MORE...
BOOKS: A New Old Western
If you think the historical Western disappeared with Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, think again. Michigan crime writers Elmore Leonard and Loren Estleman have been writing them for years. Ron Hansen's early novels told the stories of the Dalton and James gangs in Kansas. And then there is the 800 pound gorilla in the genre: Larry McMurtry's sweeping Lonesome Dove, a novel so good and so rich in character that it won a Pulitzer and became a four part TV mini-series. No Western has quite measured up since – until Mary Doria Russell's new novel Doc. MORE...
JK: I know what would make my sore back feel better….. A nice big bowl of Mac ‘N Cheese!
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