Through the long hot nights of summer and early autumn I have been listening to the ten newest songs from Leonard Cohen, almost unbearably sad in their themes and beautiful in their bareness, yet turned sultry and smoky and rich with a full-bodied looseness thanks to his collaborator in life and in art, Anjani. The […]
The air, sultry, pulsing, hot even along the pitch-black streets, is redolent of Cuba. The two-storey gingerbread white houses, their leafy verandahs looking out on swampy gardens, hammocks swaying under Gothic extravagances, make you think you are in Haiti. On one car on sleepy Fleming Street, defiant outlaw legends painted all over it, one of […]
At night, every night, electrical storms broke across the bay, the mangrove trees in front of my little motel shaking in the wind, the clouds above the ocean lit up every few seconds by long, silent blasts of Turner-esque light, as if the heavens were receiving an X-ray. When I stepped out of my little […]
Suddenly, rising above the clumps of tea bushes that smother the rolling hills of central Sri Lanka–slight female Tamil workers moving up and down the slopes with baskets on their backs–a great forested outcropping appears. You pass a long flight of steps along the main road, leading up to a Hindu temple. A sign for […]
Once every three or four months, or five, for much of my adult life now, I’ve got in my car in my mother’s house in the dry hills of California, above the sea, and driven up our road, around some switchback turns, past the White Lotus yoga foundation, past the community of Sixties refugees, hiding […]
When you scramble up the unpaved paths that link guesthouse to teahouse in the exiled Tibetan center of Dharamsala—the spiritual home of Tibet today (and of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama)—you can feel yourself subject to an optical illusion. On many days in the spring and the autumn the sun rises so sharply behind the snowcaps […]
A moment comes back to me, unbidden and far too often, that probably speaks for many such moments in many too many lives. A fifteen year-old classmate is lecturing a few of us, and a bewildered Classics teacher, in a little room in Berkshire, in 1972, on the timeless literary brilliance of Pink Floyd’s recent […]
Once upon a time there was an implication. He didn’t get picked very often when the other kids were choosing teams, and he tended to live in the shadows. But he always had a sense of pride, deep down, because he knew that people would call on him in their most important moments: in bed […]
This is what an English country town might look like, you think, after it had been emptied out by a nuclear disaster, and airlifted down upon a dry and semi-tropical Californian landscape. The buildings are one or two storeys high, no more, and the eentre of town runs out almost before you get there; the […]
The very notion of a man who translated Heidegger into English (The Essence of Reasons; Northwestern University Press; 1969) being allowed to film mega-budget Hollywood movies starring George Clooney, John Travolta and Colin Farrell is enough to make some of us believe there’s justice of some rough kind in the world. Terrence Malick grew up […]
