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Lines in the Water: Sailing with the Nathan of Dorchester

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The boat was waiting for us. Not dramatically. Not with fanfare or creaking grandeur. Just quietly, the way old truths tend to wait, tied gently to the dock in Cambridge, Maryland. Her hull white and unbothered, her lines taut against the pilings, her sails bundled like folded hands. Her name, painted just above the rail in crisp lettering, was  Nathan of Dorchester . The day was bright. The air smelled like river salt and sunscreen. A few of us stood at the edge of the harbor, squinting, not entirely sure what to expect. This wasn’t a thrill ride or a reenactment. No pirate flags. No costumed guides. Just a skipjack and the people who loved her. And so we climbed aboard. At first, you don’t think about history. You think about footing. The slight give of the deck. The ropes underfoot. The unexpected intimacy of being on a boat powered only by wind and bodies. There’s no engine hum. No digital screens. Just the creak of wood and the sound of someone asking if you’ll help raise the ...
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The Band That Shouldn’t Have Worked: Genesis, Three Sides Live, and the Sound of Reformation

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They were supposed to be over. Twice. Once when Gabriel left, once again when Hackett followed. But there they were in 1982, tight, relentless, and smiling. Not proving anything. Just playing like they belonged there.  Three Sides Live , Genesis’s hybrid concert film and live album, doesn’t just document a band on tour; it captures the strange alchemy of artistic rebirth and a pivotal moment in the history of one of the most influential bands to ever play. Most bands don’t survive the departure of their mythmaker. Genesis lost two: Peter Gabriel, their masked, fox-headed bard, and Steve Hackett, their angular, pastoral architect. The late ’70s should have buried them. Instead, they turned inward, writing not with grand design but raw necessity. The result wasn’t just continuity. It was a mutation. A quiet, self-determined kind of resurrection. Genesis didn’t just pivot, they split their skin. Released in June 1982,  Three Sides Live  straddled two worlds. The double LP co...
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The Genre We Inherited, The Woman We Forgot

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There is a staircase in every haunted house, and it never leads anywhere good. But what if the staircase is circular, winding back on itself like a snake swallowing its own secrets? I came across Mary Roberts Rinehart’s  The Circular Staircase  only recently, while working my way through one of those 'Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time' lists, half curiosity, half pilgrimage. What I expected was a dated curiosity, something dusty and overwritten, a historical artifact more than a living work. What I found, instead, was the foundation. Not just of a mystery, but of something stranger and more structurally daring. The blueprint, not for a murder, but for a genre. Published in 1908,  The Circular Staircase  was Mary Roberts Rinehart’s first full-length novel, serialized originally in  All-Story Magazine  before being released in book form by Bobbs-Merrill. It tells the story of Rachel Innes, a sharp-tongued, middle-aged woman who rents a sprawling country home...
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Location: Washington, DC, USA
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Where the Wild Boar Dies: Power, Pageantry, and Performance in Carle Vernet’s A Boar Hunt in Poland

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Carle Vernet,  A Boar Hunt in Poland , ca. early 19th century. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Photograph by the author. The moment you look at it, you can feel the dirt fly. Not metaphorically. Literally,  A Boar Hunt in Poland  by Carle Vernet seems to detonate right in front of you. Horses rear, dogs snarl, a pike catches the light mid-thrust. In the middle of it all, a dying boar still fights back, a lump of muscle and defiance against the crimson swirl of aristocracy on horseback. It’s not a painting so much as a tableau frozen milliseconds before either triumph or gore. But beyond its bravado, the painting whispers something older and colder: this isn’t just a hunt, it’s a ritual. A performance of dominance. A mirror of empire. And the more you look, the more it begins to resemble a history painting in disguise, a drama of class, conquest, and the spectacle of control. Carle Vernet’s  A Boar Hunt in Poland  is an early 19th-century oil painting, pa...
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Misdiagnosed: Reclaiming “Barefoot” from Critical Neglect

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Photo by Bart Singer - © 2013 - Barefoot Pictures, LLC I know this is a strange choice to launch a blog about art and culture, a forgotten romantic dramedy from 2014 that critics barely touched and the mental health community seemed to swat away on reflex, like a gnat that got too close to a diagnosis.  Barefoot  is not a canonical work. It’s not visionary or cult-classic. It's a quiet movie by traditional standards. But it’s where I’m starting.  Barefoot , odd, unassuming, and almost accidentally revealing, is part of what drove me to create this space in the first place. This blog wasn’t born out of a need to celebrate prestige. It was born out of frustration at how often cultural works, especially small, fragile, tonally strange ones, get misread, flattened, or dismissed by people who seem not to have experienced them at all. The kind of “critical drive-by” that reduces a film to a logline, a thumbnail, or worse, a hashtag for outrage. I wrote about this in m...
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Location: Washington, DC, USA
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Beyond the Blurb: What This Blog Is, and What It Refuses to Be

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  The Cultural Sea of Noise We live in a golden age of access, and a landfill of meaning. There’s more art, more music, more books, more films, more curated travel itineraries, and more content about all of it than ever before. You can stream ten thousand movies before breakfast. You can scroll through a hundred half-thoughts on architecture, or watch someone “explain” Hamlet in thirty seconds with a ring light and a soft filter. And yet, with all of that, so little of it seems to  stay . We binge and forget. We repost without reading. We skim for vibes, not ideas. Culture is everywhere, but depth? That’s getting harder to find. That’s the climate this blog enters into. Not to “disrupt the discourse” (a phrase I would only use ironically and under duress), but to step aside from the churn and say:  What if we actually slowed down and looked? What if we treated a film not as content but as a question? What if we read a book not to post a rating, but to ask:  Why was t...
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Location: Washington, DC, USA
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