“Why the Nightingale Sings: On Bobby Darin’s ‘Beautiful Things’”: HERE. Attention-Conservation Keywords: Dr. Dolittle, “Dean Martin existentialism,” memento mori in the cocktail lounge, lovers with wings, the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, Roland Barthes’s concept of the “punctum,” the nightingale as symbol, Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, […]
This Saturday, at the extraordinary New York Academy of Medicine Library, I’ll be speaking from 12:30-1 PM on “Gray Matter: The Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries,” at a conference brilliantly curated by Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy and featuring, among others, Oliver Sacks, Lawrence Weschler, Michael Sappol, Amy Herzog, and Salvador Olguin. WHAT: Festival of […]
Men’s fashion mags make my left knee jerk. Then again, why should fascists have the best boots? The Politics Of Style: Reading T Magazine. Historically, the Left, in postwar America, has sneered at fashion as frivolous, fatuous, and irredeemably bourgeois, embracing body hair, B.O., Salvation Army schmatte-wear, and a determined frumpiness as tokens of anti-establishment authenticity, […]
My essay “England My England: Anglophilia Explained” is now an audiobook, listed under “humor” (shouldn’t it be “humour”?), at Audible.com. Buy it here.
A BEACH READ FOR SURREALISTS. Just the thing to tuck into while nibbling your lobster-telephone roll. “Blood Sports In A Starched Collar: Surrealist Etiquette.” TIME CONSERVATION KEYWORDS: Rimbaud’s table manners, Emily Post, anarcho-dandyism, The Chap Manifesto: Revolutionary Etiquette for the Modern Gentleman, the death of manners, “mental hygiene” movies in postwar Amreica, the political history […]
If you read *anything* by me this long, hot summer, read this: “Skin in the Game: An American Gothic in Black and White,” my essay on the murder of Trayvon Martin. It’s a polemic, it’s cultural criticism, it’s personal history, it’s Southern Gothic in the greasy faced, lynching-postcard mode, it’s the muck that came up […]
 Zaniest. conversation. EVER. Mark Frauenfelder, the Dick Cavett of Nonlinear Talk and host of the Boing Boing podcast GWEEK, engaged me in the most deliriously free-associated, brain-ticklingly delightful interview I’ve ever conducted.  Keywords (for the time-starved): Bunuel’s recipe for the Platonic ideal of the martini, Norman Rockwell’s dark side, the horror of Disneyland […]
A NEW essay, equal parts philosophical investigation (of memory, time, and museum vitrines) and memoir (mem-noir?): “Castle of the Living Dead: Time, Embalmed.” Keywords: Taxidermy, photography as taxidermy, Christopher Lee, the uncanniness of natural-history museum vitrines, the suburban horror of nature, the author’s fossilized childhood. Teaser: Why do passing encounters with the inconsequential lodge themselves […]
Shameless Exploitation Dept.: I’ve Tweeted about the importance of paying writers. I’ve been twitted about *not* being able to pay photographers. Now, I’m doing The Bad Thing Again: advertising for UNPAID (but, I hasten to say, NOT unremunerated) labor. I’m looking for a detail-oriented, responsible transcriber, preferably a writer, grad student, or the like, to transcribe […]
Read the inaugural installation of “Mythologies,” my irregular series of interviews with cultural critics, at Thought Catalog. First up: food scribe and cultural historian Josh Ozersky, the Macaulay of offal, talking about food and gender: Playboy‘s role in changing men’s perceptions of food and cooking, the post-’70s shift in American attitudes about the unmanliness of […]