Archive | The Smart Set

Whistlin’ Dixie

Stefany Anne Golberg — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 16:12:43 +0000

Driving south from the North, we tried to spot exactly where the real South begins. We looked for the South in hand-scrawled signs on the roadside advertising ‘Boil Peanut’, in one-room corrugated tin Baptist churches that are little more than holy sheds, in the crumbling plantation homes with their rose gardens and secrets. In the […]

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Deep Discounts

Morgan Meis — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 16:12:43 +0000

More than forty years ago, on the eighth floor of an auditorium in Dayton’s department store in Minneapolis, the artist Red Grooms created a unique installation. He called it The Discount Store (1970). The work was commissioned by the Walker Art Center, which was still in the process of building its now-famous permanent home in […]

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Picture Books

Stefany Anne Golberg — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 16:12:43 +0000

“The Written Image” was an exhibit of German Expressionist art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But it was not the exhibit of German Expressionism you might expect to see — none of Ernst Kirchner’s lurid scenes of degenerated Berlin society smeared across the streets. It was a show, rather, of portfolios, periodicals, […]

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After Joan

Paula Marantz Cohen — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 16:12:43 +0000

I never thought I’d watch it after Joan was gone. I’m talking Fashion Police — a show on E! whose raison d’etre is to extol and goof on gowns at red carpet events — after the death of its presiding spirit, Joan Rivers. Truly, a profoundly shallow and frivolous entertainment, but one that I acknowledge […]

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Lonely Teardrops

Stephen Akey — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 16:12:43 +0000

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” Robert Frost admonished. He was talking about the “clarification of life” that poetry brings, and you don’t see clearly through tears. Also, being a stoic New Englander, Frost was temperamentally disinclined to emotional display, even in the face of extreme tragedy, of which his poetry […]

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Story, Time

Morgan Meis — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 16:12:43 +0000

One day in the summer of 1896, Maxim Gorky’s mind was blown. Gorky was attending a Russian fair and had gone to visit an exhibit by a couple of Frenchmen known as the Lumiére Brothers. Sitting in a darkened room, Gorky saw what seemed to him a photograph of the streets of Paris projected onto […]

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The Real Problem with Public Discourse

Michael Lind — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 16:12:43 +0000

I distinctly remember when I stopped reading online comments about my essays. For some time I had been reading them on a website of a magazine that published me and allowed unedited comments. To my disappointment, no knowledgeable critic had pointed out errors in my work that I could correct, or made informed arguments that […]

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On Snow

Stefany Anne Golberg — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 16:12:43 +0000

When I was two years old, or maybe four years old, it snowed in Las Vegas. The snow covered the concrete and the sand, and the alleyways between the casinos downtown. Even though I’m sure the snow was only an inch or so deep, it made a big impression on the citizens of the city, […]

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Stumbling on the Sublime

Paula Marantz Cohen — Fri, 23 Jan 2015 16:12:43 +0000

I ducked into the main branch of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue on a cold January day and found myself in one of its frequent free exhibitions, this one on the halls of the third floor (there are also exhibits on the ground floor). The show was of prints […]

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From Poesy to Carrot Carnations

Michael Lind — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 16:12:43 +0000

I had never heard of a carrot carnation. But when, back in the 1980s, several of my fellow staffers at the office of a Texas State Senator in Austin wanted to learn about them, I went along to kill some time. (There are downsides to working in the legislature of a state with an anti-government […]

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