Jasper Johns at the Whitney — Ever since the Whitney first announced a full-scale Jasper Johns retrospective I have been anticipating how best to tackle writing about this man and his art. Johns has been a touchstone for me my whole adult life; to say that he is my favorite artist is unequal to the role…

2021 in the Rearview Mirror — The utility of year-in-review lists seems ever more tenuous the deeper we get into this [gestures]; nevertheless, here are some things I saw and read in 2021: Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl, Eurydice. This stunning new opera, which ran for only seven nights at the Met, was a dazzling experience…

Reading log, Fall 2021 — Pam Lewis, A Perfect Family. Adequately executed thriller about a troubled WASP clan and its dark secrets. Sexy and fun, but ultimately forgettable. Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. The book so disgusted and enraged me that I simply gave up, out of self-preservation…

Log: Reading, Viewing, Listening, Summer 2021 — Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political.” I am always interested in the origins of commonplace phrases, slogans, axioms, bywords, etc., and so it was enlightening to encounter the source of this once-ubiquitous, oft-misunderstood phrase. Hanisch’s essay, a brisk polemic first appearing in the anthology Notes from the Second Year: Women’s…

Reading Log: Winter–Spring 2021 — Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball, by Luke Epplin. An outstanding piece of sports and cultural history from a fine young writer whom I know, in that NYC way, as a kind of a Twitter/friend-of-a-friend/publishing-adjacent acquaintance. The four men are Cleveland…

Duquann Sweeney and the Currents of Urban Life — Jersey City artist and activist Duquann Sweeney has been quietly amassing a body of photography that displays a sure touch and a hard-earned beauty. …

Donald Judd at MoMA — I managed to get to “Judd” just under the wire, on a frigid January Saturday right after the New Year. Donald Judd, who died in 1994, has long been one of my favorite artists, as well as a primary influence on my own decidedly amateur artistic practice. I had seen…

Notes on a Catastrophic Year — Words fail in the face of 2020. So much has already nonetheless been written about this terrifying year, however, that trying to drum up more pipe-puffing armchair generalizations feels downright grotesque. There was, of course, no opera or baseball or museums or live music to enthuse about this year, which…

Reading log; end of the year (decade? era? world?) — Dispatches, by Michael Herr. Like many people, I sense, I have occasionally had a hard time reading over the course of this disorienting and scarifying year, finding myself unable to bring my normally formidable reserves of concentration fully to bear on the matter at hand. At such times, I often…