Hobo Matters
I may be very late to this, but I’ll share anway. One little discovery during my preparation for the SILVERDOCS film criticism panel last week is this dead-on parody of the Ken Burns documentary...
View ArticleThrice-told tales, and worse
One of the worst things about mainstream journalism is the herd mentality. Sad to see it affecting the documentary world, too. Here we have a new film about Herb and Dorothy Vogel, the adorable,...
View ArticleNo one you see, is smarter than he…*
For years I reserved a special animus against the Flipper show, the dolphin drama that had a popular run in the 1960s. It wasn’t the cute cetaceans, it was the show’s title, which is also a nickname...
View ArticleVisual Acoustics
The title, which I don’t much like, strikes me as one of those clever mixing of ideas and media that doesn’t yield anything meaningful. But the film Visual Acoustics is great fun for people who love...
View ArticleWatching Latrobe
WETA will premiere a new documentary about the great, but often neglected architect Benjamin Latrobe, tomorrow evening. I wrote about Latrobe’s masterpiece, the Baltimore Basilica, after it was...
View ArticleDetroit on PBS
For a few months shy of a year, I called Detroit home in 1995. I loved the city and the people I met there. I loved its architecture and its sadness, its empty streets and surreal highways. It was an...
View ArticleWar in Lebanon, and a museum in Qatar
Catching up on a few recent Washington Post stories. Last Sunday I wrote about a new exhibition of art from Lebanon, art which is sadly but understandably preoccupied with war, sectarian division and...
View ArticleAt the Aspen Ideas Festival
Last week, I spent two and a half very pleasant days at the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual meeting of intellectual leaders from around the planet, with a focus this year on China. I moderated two...
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