In "Heartburn," Nora Ephron calls the relationship with her best friends "a shrine to food", but Nora Ephron's entire life was a shrine to food. Even in the deepest throes of heartbreak, she knew just how to reach for the stovetop in a way that could melt away the sharpest edges of the pain, finding comfort in whichever mouthful would come next. Braving herself through the heartache, until she was ready to cook for someone new again.
Unlike the cockroach — the unofficial mascot of New York City apartments — ants aren’t quite as common in high rises, preferring soil-filled parks and yards. But now, scientists who study ants say a species from Europe has recently made the city its home, and the insects are now being found in living spaces several stories above the street.
The tales collected in Frederic Tuten’s The Bar at Twilight make me think of the sculptor Alexander Calder creating and playing with the elements of his circus, performing it in Paris for contemporaries and friends such as Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, and Joan Miró. Later video documentation shows the artist taking his responsibilities as homo ludens very seriously as he demonstrates the possible range of kinetic combinations of elements he began creating in the late 1920s.
Although Tuten was not yet born when Calder began making his circus figures of wire and wood, his work shares the same sense of thoughtful playfulness, the imaginative reconfiguration of “stock” elements in different scenarios, and the pleasure in having in his audience a cadre of artistic peers. Many of those peers, in Tuten’s case, have stories in The Bar at Twilight dedicated to them. They hail from the worlds of music, theater, literature, and the visual arts, and the stories’ dedications often indicate both friendship and an aesthetic correspondence. Moreover, the association with the visual arts — particularly, painting — is germane to the way Tuten uses the medium of language.
In Let’s Do It Bob Stanley gives a quintessential account of the Birth of Pop, one which will send anyone again and again to their record collection to listen to the greatest artists, well remembered or forgotten, of the 20th century.