drmstream[writing]

They stopped us at the bot­tom of the jet­way. We were the first ones to board, had scanned our tick­ets and paced down the car­peted walk­way with the pecu­liar metro­nomic inten­sity of reg­u­lar trav­el­ers. They weren’t ready for us. We were a mot­ley gath­er­ing: a tall, thin woman with a pinched face read­ing a faded […]

What do you make of a moment when you real­ize the you are a super-structure, or an out­crop­ping, and that the foun­da­tions that you relied on blindly aren’t squarely placed on earth, but are adjunct and extra­ne­ous? We are seduced by the frag­ile beauty of these images when we encounter them: beach cot­tages on stilts, […]

Every Sun­day, the young man who wanted to be a writer went out early to the cor­ner news­stand to buy The New York Times. He had a rou­tine. Shuf­fle and deal, like a casino hand: sports sec­tion, arts sec­tion, week in review, and last, because it would get the most time and con­sid­er­a­tion, the Book […]

From 1901 to 1964, the major­ity of the stone cir­cle was restored in a series of makeovers which have left it, in the words of one archae­ol­o­gist, as ‘a prod­uct of the 20th cen­tury her­itage indus­try’. Another les­son in con­text and inter­ven­tion: the mon­u­ment at Stone­henge is more replica than arti­fact. You can get the […]

The paint­ing is Olympia by Edouard Manet. In 1865, it was pil­lo­ried by peo­ple of good sense as depraved and immoral. A jour­nal­ist wrote: If the can­vas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the pre­cau­tions that were taken by the admin­is­tra­tion. Years later, Manet’s paint­ing has been pegged as the start […]

  The over­crowded mind can lead to an unset­tled soul. Over the years I’ve learned to trust my tech­niques for qui­et­ing my mind. I let my con­scious­ness float, drift into an unde­fined space that sus­pends the for­ward momen­tum of thought, qui­ets down the chat­ter and waits for a struc­ture to form. Even as I wait the […]

Yes­ter­day I flew from the east coast to Los Ange­les and watched two movies that were uncanny in the sim­i­lar­ity of their view of the human con­di­tion. The moral syn­chronic­ity was more star­tling for the cul­tural chasm between the two films: the uber-Wasp cor­po­rate real­ity of the Reit­man broth­ers’ Up in the Air and the […]

Fre­quent and sub­stan­tial con­ver­sa­tions with oth­ers cre­ates a sense of well-being, accord­ing to a psy­chol­ogy study reported in Sci­ence Daily this morn­ing. Greater well-being was related to spend­ing less time alone and more time talk­ing to oth­ers: The hap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talk­ing than the unhap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants. In […]

via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com Film­maker Errol Mor­ris writes an inter­est­ing and occa­sional blog for the NY Times about pho­tog­ra­phy. He’s inter­ested in the way that the choices of the pho­tog­ra­pher influ­ence the under­stand­ing of the viewer about the image. Pho­tog­ra­phy has great power to manip­u­late, for its real­ism reduces our skep­ti­cism, yet the intent of a skillful […]

Weak peo­ple project weak­ness on every­one around them. Fright­ened peo­ple project fear on every­one around them. Strong peo­ple can’t under­stand what all the fuss is about.