. The audience and appreciation are starting to build, in its third season, for Treme, just as it did late for the brilliant David Simon‘s earlier The Wire. Whether it is the worlds of the inner city drug trade, policing, municipal government, unions, education, or journalism in Baltimore, or of high end chefs and dining in Treme, […]
How We Lived On It (54) – “Scrabble with Matthews”
. The kind of poetic conceit etymologicon that delights in the service of deep feeling. Scrabble with Matthews BY DAVID WOJAHN (Poetry magazine October 2002) Jerboa on a triple: I was in for it, my zither on a double looking feeble as a “promising” first book. Oedipal & reckless, my scheme would fail: keep him a couple drinks ahead, […]
Purity & Invention: a Claude Sautet Retrospective
. From August 1-9 this summer, The Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted a long overdue retrospective of the films of Claude Sautet (1924-2000). Probably best known to younger, more contemporary audiences for his late flowering of 1990s films Un Coeur en Hiver (A Heart in Winter) and Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (Nelly and Mr. Arnaud), Sautet established […]
The Poetry of Democracy
. In my Poetic License column for the fall issue of West, I return to last year’s New York Review of Books contretemps between Helen Vendler and Rita Dove over the latter’s The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. When I first wrote about the dispute, I considered the the politics in poetry. In “Diction and […]
Jazz Is: 42 – “The Cure”
. Feeling low, in despair, beset by the boorish and the brutish? There’s a cure for that. Back in May, Julia and I, along with jazz rabbi Charlie K, dropped in on Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, and Jack DeJohnette at the Catlalina Bar & Grill in Los Angeles. The new trio’s tour was billed as a […]