Locked

The author and Kurt with Flyana Boss members Folayan Omi Kunerede (left) and Bobbi LaNea Taylor. Photo courtesy of Aline Mello. In my last year at the university, I finally started taking advantage of its discount ticket program. When I saw seats for a musical, I thought, Perfect, and got tickets for my friend Kurt and me. The show was Jesus Christ Superstar, which neither of us had ever seen. I was expecting something quirky

Alexey Brodovitch. The Sylphs (Les Sylphides), 1935–37.  Art Institute of Chicago. Purchased with funds provided by Karen and Jim Frank. Image courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. In the go-go 1980s, the last decade when print magazines in the US rode high, the last decade before the internet took over time and space, I was given an impromptu lesson in how to be a team player. Or not. The bottom line:

Old Westbury Gardens, Smoggy Afternoon, by the author.  The biggest book I own is the Norton Shakespeare, Second Edition. It’s all the plays, annotated: 3,600 pages. Lately I’ve used it to prop up my computer, to enable a more flattering angle on Zoom calls. In the fall of 2020, I was meeting every week on Zoom with a class taught by the writer Anne Carson and her husband Robert Currie. Anne announced one week that

Judy Chicago, 2023. Photo by Donald Woodman. Here’s an origin story for you. Just as America was emerging from the Great Depression, a progressive Jewish couple from Chicago, Arthur and May Cohen, welcomed their first red diaper baby: Judy. Six years later, when Judy was home alone with her little brother, she heard a knock at the door and opened it to two FBI agents. When May arrived home, she found the men interrogating her

We know how Joan Didion saw the world because she told us herself, quoting a psychiatrist’s report written during her 1968 breakdown: It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view[,] she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations . . . A

Alumni Sweater I graduated from UC Berkeley the summer of ’88 I am a crowning achievement of liberality I often wear my Berkeley sweater some thirty years after its relevance to me near as I can tell when the fabric clings to my perfect goddamn muscle daddy gym body to the rest of the world all my bullshit is rendered virtually scentless it’s a look that reads “I fuck white boys and voted for Biden”