I have the distinct privilege of having played my trusty Hagstrom II guitar (quite badly) in several Long Island-based garage bands back in the day. All these bands strictly adhered to the maxim “fun first, musicianship second.” Our cover versions were not guided by deliberate fidelity to the originals and…

I have always been ambivalent about travel at best and terrified of it at worst. Part of this is due to my reflexive worrying and catastrophizing whenever I depart. Did I shut the coffee maker off? Did I lock both locks on the front door? Did I remember to pack…

Hiya again…

Debt ceiling crises are as periodic and predictable as El Niño. When the political atmosphere is plagued by the instability of a Republican Congress and a Democratic Presidency, one can expect ill winds to cross the land. However, one big difference between global meteorological phenomena and U.S. politics is that…

Please forgive this horrible pun. I couldn’t help myself.

Romantic Pessimism in The Psychedelic Furs’ Book of Days Romanticism can be edifying: a tale of the ways of Spirit-in-the-World, elaborated in Wordsworth’s chronicles of the lake district or Caspar-David Friedrich’s exhilarated man standing on a mountaintop. But too much exhilaration usually leads to disillusion, even exhaustion, and that is also part of the Romantic legacy. Pessimism as an…

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, The Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, New York, September 29, 2021, through February 13, 2022 The received “discourse” among artworld historians goes something like this: Abstract Expressionism shifted the focus from Paris to New York City. With the help of critics like Clement Greenberg and…

Review of Molly Farneth, Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation (Princeton University Press, 2018) What has Jena to do with Jerusalem? Or Washington D.C., for that matter? Plenty, it turns out. It was in Jena, as Napoleon’s armies were advancing on the city, where Georg Wilhelm Friedrich…

Hodos anō katō mia kai hōutē. (The path up and down is one and the same.) — Heraclitus, Fragment 60 Five years ago, I managed to execute a simultaneous exit and re-entry: I started transitioning from male to female and began my return to the Christian church. Were you to…