Nearby Café Home > Food and Travel > Island Living
|
Regular readers of this column surely know that, generally speaking, I stand against censorship and in defense of photographers’ inquiries into many aspects of both public and private life. They also know that I draw some lines, as in the case of the posthumous publication in 1996 of Diane Arbus’s pictures (made circa 1970) of […] Celebrity-mourning appears to enjoy an extremely short half-life, if we gauge it by the rapid decline in commemorative oomph of public “outpourings of grief” over the 1997 death of Princess Diana and the 1999 demise of John F. Kennedy, Jr. The muted and minor attention paid to them on their anniversaries this year suggests an […] Having commented in this space a year ago about the media feeding frenzy over the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., I thought I’d come at that question from a different angle. This rumination is prompted by the imminent third anniversary of the death in Paris of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed on August 3, […] When I was growing up small and skinny in New York City, prey to the aggressive males of my species and an avid reader of escapist fantasies, one location where these aspects of my risky boyhood social situation coalesced were the advertising back pages of comic books. There — amid the sales pitches for “X-ray […] Let’s face it, people: The next two years look to be pretty much a wash. Don’t expect to get a whole lot of work done, and you best bring a lunch. The folks who can’t count assumed that the present millennium ended at the very stroke of midnight this coming December 31st. Many of them […] A good friend of mine, living in the Nordic countries for some years, recently emailed me to ask a favor. Her co-worker, founder of an innovative digital project for artists and teachers and the general public, found himself hitting a brick wall with his venture in its start-up phase. He and I haven’t met yet, […] Lately I’m pondering the case of scholar and teacher Mary Daly, about whose current struggle with Boston University you may have heard. Daly, referred to by one supporter as “a radical feminist star,”1 found her courses dropped from the catalogue by this university, at which she’d taught for decades, when she chose not to obey […] It was easy to mourn the “death,” in the winter of 1998, of Bobby Simone, the sweet-eyed detective who passed away prematurely of heart failure on NYPD Blue. For those who watch this series regulary, Simone (played by Jimmy Smits) was the obvious hero: big, hunky, tender-hearted, caring, loving, miraculously uncompromised and uncontaminated by the […] An acquaintance of mine, Geoffrey F., who lives in Köln, Germany, once suckered me into a long argument about the Holocaust — not about the event itself, but mostly about how many Jews seemed to have a proprietary relationship to the word, an unwillingness to share it with groups who’d undergone different but terrible catastrophes […] I’m proposing Dave’s Law: No establishment serving food shall be allowed to list on its menus or announce via its waitpersons more than a maximum of four ingredients or preparation methods involved in any one dish — upon penalty of having to serve the entire party burgers on the house. […] |