webmama
Does it matter if future generations don’t understand the pop cultural references embedded in today’s TV shows? At Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz ponders the enduring question of timeliness versus timelessness in light of TV’s current mode, “Reference-o-Rama.” Shows like The Simpsons and 30 Rock, he writes, are “footnote shows” (meaning, they’ll need to be accompanied [...]
The Times Style section discovers reproduction vintage clothes. “Many devotees of reproduction vintage clothing said ‘Mad Men,’ the AMC television show set in the 1960s, as well as movie classics like ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Rear Window,’ had kindled their interest in fashions of the past. Says Becky Biesiada, 34, a day care provider and student in [...]
The wood sliced for these names had darkened with age so it paled against the bark like the dessicated flesh of a yellow fruit. She ran a finger along the fretted letters, her eyebrows drew together and filled with a stern feeling, she wished suddenly that not a single one of them had ever been [...]
welcome to the human brain
When you are starting a new job in less than a week, you’re dealing with at least two lists. There’s the long errand and shopping and chore-focused to-do list (get dress tailored, do laundry, buy black boots, sew buttons on cardigan…), and then there’s the more abstract list of things that would be fun or [...]
i want to be a part of it?
I just finished Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, which I’d been dying to read. It was romantic and star-studded and captured 1970’s NYC in an enviable way, and I got pretty wrapped up in the day-to-day details of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and the lives of two talented people on the verge of something [...]
memory objects
My mom was in Toronto last month, dealing with the deeply sad task of figuring out which of my grandmother’s painstakingly assembled photo albums to keep intact. For most of her life, my grandmother put together an album after every trip she and my grandfather took (and there were many). She admitted that it was [...]
Journalist Geoffrey Gray cuts right to the heart of what it means that Tom Robbins and Wayne Barrett are leaving (and/or being booted from) the Village Voice:
Our click-through economy no longer has time for institutional memory, or a way to reward the merits of mentorship, and our budgets reflect it. There are fewer [...]
André Aciman writes beautifully about anticipating, and sometimes dreading, what he knows will come next in the life of his family:
[My son] liked rituals. I liked rehearsing. Rituals are when we wish to repeat what has already happened, rehearsals when we repeat what we fear might yet occur. Maybe the two are one and the [...]
My favorite discovery of 2010 was Meghan Daum. Her first book was a collection of essays called My Misspent Youth, and I read it this year at once aghast that I hadn’t known about it before, and grateful to be able to come to it both fresh and late. Soon after, I sat on a [...]