Ars Est Mendacium

Week two arrived with confidence. Possibly misplaced confidence. Same book. Same Susan section. Same belief that by now I had a decent handle on what four potatoes looked like in real life. I did not. Once again, I produced more potato than the recipe had any intention of accommodating. One full, perfectly sliced potato sat on the counter like an uninvited guest. Out here, excess doesn’t linger. The Forrester creatures , those ever-watchful trash pandas of the woods , were thrilled with their unexpected side dish. Somewhere in the trees, a raccoon ate better than planned, which feels aligned with the spirit of a cookbook that assumes adults will quietly handle the consequences of their own math. The real comedy, however, happened at the stove. The recipe offers a casual fork in the road: double boiler or saucepan. As if this were a lifestyle choice. We chose the saucepan, largely out of optimism and a misplaced belief in our ability to multitask. The sauce had other ideas. It thickene...

You notice it only after the first assumption fails. You expect to see a canvas. You expect to see where the work is going. But the longer you stand in front of  The Sketchers , the clearer it becomes that the painting has no interest in satisfying that expectation. The figures are there. The tools are there. The gestures are unmistakable. And yet the evidence of outcome is missing, or deliberately misplaced. That absence is not a mistake. It is the subject. Painted in 1913,  The Sketchers  belongs to a moment when  John Singer Sargent  had already begun withdrawing from the systems that once defined his success. Society portraiture had rewarded him lavishly, but it came with a price, the constant requirement to produce visible, legible results for an audience trained to consume them. What emerges here is not rebellion, not retreat, but something more precise: a reordering of priorities. Two artists work outdoors in an olive grove near Lake Garda . On the left ...

There is a moment late in  Redskin  when the screen quite literally grows larger. The image expands, the music swells, and the film announces that something final has been achieved. Prosperity has arrived. Conflict has been resolved. Everyone, we are told, should now feel relief. That choice matters more than it seems. Released in 1929, at the edge of the silent era and the beginning of sound,  Redskin  is a film preoccupied with resolution. It wants to smooth the fracture, to make opposing worlds fit inside a single frame. Education and tradition. Modern systems and ancient ties. White law and Native life. What it never fully confronts is who gets to define what resolution means, and who bears the cost of that definition. The film follows Wing Foot , a Native man educated in the East, who returned home carrying a knowledge that does not translate cleanly. White society refuses him outright. His own people see him as changed, compromised, no longer fully of them. Th...

There are many ways people decide to cook again. Some buy new knives. Some watch too many videos. Some declare a health goal and announce it loudly to no one in particular. We chose a book. Not just any book, but  The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook , published in 1963 by Harcourt, Brace & World, edited by Dorothy B. Marsh , and heavy enough to qualify as both a culinary reference and a defensive instrument. It smells faintly of old paper and confidence. The kind of confidence that assumes you will read the instructions first. Every Sunday, my wife and I are going to cook from it. Not every recipe. That would be reckless. Also impractical, since my wife does not eat meat, though she does not claim the word vegetarian as an identity badge. She simply does not eat meat, which is different. So this will be a selective relationship. A respectful one. We will choose carefully, adapt where necessary, and accept that mid-century America assumed bacon fat was a moral good. Why this b...

I was in Austin for a conference, so I was already tired when I arrived. Conferences do that. Windowless rooms, informative sessions, lots of standing, and while that is amazing, I was exhausted. By the end of the day, I wasn’t looking for meaning. I was looking for food. Something close to the hotel. Something reliable. Something that would not ask me to think any harder than I already had. I did not set out to find Gus’s . I found it the way you find the things that matter more than expected, by accident, while trying to solve a smaller problem. The room didn’t pull me in. It didn’t glow with intention. It didn’t signal importance. Red brick walls , worn, not styled. Checkered tables that had done this job for a long time. Chairs that did not match because no one cared if they did. Neon signs that looked like they were inherited, not commissioned. Memphis everywhere, quietly, stubbornly, unconcerned with where it had landed. I sat because it was there. That matters. In a city that...

The first thing you see is not a chord, not a face, not even a name. It is motion. Four young men in suits run like they are late for their own lives, and behind them comes a crowd that looks less like fans than weather, a sudden front rolling down a London street. The camera keeps up just enough to prove this is real, or at least real enough that your body believes it. It is a funny opening, until you notice what the joke is actually built on. They are not running toward something. They are running away from everything. That is the quiet truth inside  A Hard Day’s Night . For all its grin, for all its bounce and wordplay, it is a film about being pursued, packaged, scheduled, and watched. It looks like play while describing work. It laughs while documenting a life that cannot stop long enough to feel its own weight. That is why it still holds. Not because it is “about The Beatles ” in the commemorative sense, but because it is about the moment a human being becomes a public obje...