The algorithm, I have grown fond of declaiming – in bars mostly, though not only – is as much of the inapprehensible hand of God as we are likely to know in this sorrowing mortal world. I’m thinking of course of whatever abstruse sequence of code it is that operates the “shuffle” function on your…
Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk-– Henry David Thoreau As with much else, you could I suppose just blame the Eighties. It was 1989 and there were perhaps five or six of us…
We are, my youngest stepdaughter and I, at the bar. This is years ago. It’s true there are not many other 13-year-olds poised on stools and leaning, as if expertly, toward the beer-spigots and ranks of bottles, but nobody seems to mind. The kid herself certainly does not. She swivels this way and that, bends…
College, for me, was like coming over the ridgeline of adolescence and discovering, in one long exultant gulp of perception, that I’d lived unknowingly for years in the outer suburbs of a glittering Oz-like metropolis, except instead of emeralds and munchkins there was French cinema and birth control. Some people get to school and discover…
I am not a sports fan. It’s true, I watch a little, and have some bits of gear – my Italia jersey that I wear when the World Cup comes around, my Yankee hat – and in a vague way I keep up. But having a stake in the fluctuating fortunes of the New York…
Like all people not wholly destitute of heart, when I hear the opening of “ABC” by the Jackson 5 I experience the familiar jolt of pop elation – that swift giddiness of spirit that comes of being in company with a human thing that is also so pure a distillation of joyousness. This was true…
On a late-spring day sometime in the mid-90s, I found myself sitting with a friend on a stone bench overlooking a prospect of conventional, but nevertheless pretty estimable, pastoral loveliness: green valley and distant hills, cinematic cloudscapes, placid lake, etc. The friend with whom I sat was just then at the collapsing end of a…
You don’t have to be driving around with a 15-year-old on her first-ever trip to California to fall abruptly, defenselessly in love with “Call Me Maybe.” (Yes that bit of mass-cultural ubiquity, the song to which for the rest of human time lazy producers of VH-1ish “documentaries” will turn when they need to signify, swiftly and…