Ars Est Mendacium

There are songs that sound like escape, and there are songs that  are  escape. Peter Gabriel’s  “Solsbury Hill”  feels less like a pop single than a diary entry set to rhythm, a record of a man who walked away from the machine that had defined him and listened, really listened, for the first time. Its pulse is irregular, slightly off-balance, as though it’s forcing the listener to step carefully, mimicking the act of climbing. Every boom-boom-boom of the heart isn’t just percussion; it’s the cost of risk, the jolt of freedom, the possibility of transformation. Released in 1977 as Gabriel’s debut solo single, the song marked his public break from Genesis, where he had been the band’s costumed frontman and narrative architect. The single reached #13 in the UK charts, not blockbuster territory, but enough to confirm that Gabriel could stand apart from the progressive rock machinery he’d helped build. Critics praised its “lighthearted” sound, but the track carried someth...

All opinions expressed are my own. It starts with a breeze. Nothing terrifying. Nothing warns you of death. It comes through an open window or across the brow of a sweating hiker. It whispers over tin rooftops in Paris, where the buildings weren’t built for this. It brushes the fields where undocumented workers bend under the weight of heat and labor. It rides in on silence, not sirens. Because heat, unlike floods, fires, or storms, is quiet. That’s what makes it so deadly. Jeff Goodell’s  The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet  is not a dystopian thought experiment. It’s not an environmentalist’s plea wrapped in metaphor. It is a work of journalism written in the present tense. Not grammatically, but existentially. This book doesn’t speculate about future disasters. It documents the apocalypse already underway. Published in 2023 by Little, Brown and Company, Goodell’s book details the global rise in extreme heat due to climate change and the way it ...

You’ve been here before, even if you haven’t. The red booths, the hanging lamps, the vinyl tile floor that squeaks a little when it’s been freshly mopped. The poster with the cartoon owl winking through the glass. A Dr Pepper machine gleaming like an altar. You could almost smell the fry oil if it weren’t for the stillness. But it’s not a memory. It’s a painting. Ralph Goings made it in 1972, with oil on canvas, and titled it  Burger Chef Interior . And even now, more than fifty years later, it’s still glowing, quietly, on a wall at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Goings was part of the Photorealist movement, a group of artists who rejected the splatter and gesture of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a world that looked, well, exactly like the one we were in. Not prettier. Not messier. Just truer. He painted trucks, condiments, and fast food counters. Things we’re trained not to look at twice. But Goings did. And what he saw, what he preserved, was a kind of accidental holiness...

Sometimes on this blog, we pause over songs. Not just to admire the melody or the performance, but to ask what the song itself is saying, what it carries, what it confesses, what it leaves behind. Most songs pass us by as mood or background, and that’s fine; not everything needs to be dissected. But every so often, a piece of music comes along that deserves more than a passing listen. It lingers. It asks for reflection. Patty Griffin’s  “Useless Desires”  is one of those songs. It begins with departure:  “Say goodbye to the old street / That never cared much for you anyway.”  There is no nostalgia here, no golden light on the pavement. The street is indifferent, and indifference wounds more than cruelty. Then she sings of  “the different colored doorways / You thought would let you in one day.”  That couplet is devastating in its understatement: waiting for belonging that never comes, staring at doors that look inviting but stay closed. They symbolize all t...

There are books that feel like they’re about everything and nothing at once.  Mrs Dalloway  is one of those. Virginia Woolf set it all in a single June day, a woman buying flowers, planning a party, and yet it feels like it contains the whole of life, love, regret, memory, the ticking of time, and the shadow of war. I remember first reading it and wondering how anyone could write so much about so little. Years later, the reverse feels true: how could anyone fit so much into the quiet passing of a single day? Woolf’s novel, published in 1925, was born out of fragments, stories she had already written, unfinished sketches, even a working title ( The Hours ) that tells us what she was chasing: not plot, but time itself. Clarissa Dalloway steps out into London to buy flowers, and at the same hour, a broken veteran named Septimus Warren Smith drifts through the same city, unraveling. Their lives never intersect, not really, but somehow the echo of one reverberates in the other. By ...

There’s something uncanny about walking down a city street and seeing yourself multiplied. Every shop window, every polished car hood, every angled pane of glass contains another version of you, slightly warped, refracted, or delayed. Cities are full of mirrors, but rarely do we pause to notice how much they shape our perception of space. Richard Estes did. And in  Paris Street Scene , he froze that moment of double-seeing, the ordinary made unfamiliar, into a painting so meticulous it could be mistaken for a photograph until you realize a camera could never quite capture the silence it holds. Estes is often called the father of photorealism, though the label both fits and undersells him. Yes, his canvases look like photographs, but his process was never simple duplication. He took multiple photographs, stitched their perspectives together, and then painted, not as a machine might record, but as an eye might linger.  The Paris Street Scene depicts a typical Haussmannian block,...

War never arrives clean. It drags with it dust, confusion, and the sour taste of fear that never really leaves your mouth. Sitting at home yesterday, I found myself watching  Warfare , a film that insists on reliving a single night in Iraq, November 19, 2006, as if the past were a wound that won’t close. It isn’t nostalgia. It isn’t a spectacle. It’s an invitation into claustrophobia, into a house in Ramadi where every corner hides a threat and every breath feels borrowed. The work itself is blunt in premise: Ray Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL who lived through the experience, teams with Alex Garland to bring it to the screen. Shot in real time, it follows Alpha One, a platoon holed up in a two-story house after the Battle of Ramadi. We meet Ray, the communicator, and Elliott Miller, a sniper and medic whose own body will become the narrative’s breaking point. The ensemble cast, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Cosmo Jarvis, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, and Charles Melton, plays with urgency rath...

When I first heard  Midnite Vultures , I thought Beck was laughing at me. Not at me personally, but at all of us, our pop culture, our earnestness, our need to turn music into confession. Here was an album so dense with sound, so gleefully absurd, so technically dazzling, that it felt like someone had taken every trick from a decade of studio experimentation and dumped them into a neon blender. And yet, once the glow faded, once the party lights flickered out, I realized something was missing. The record had everything: horns, samples, swagger, funk, even tenderness, but it never quite touched the heart. Listening to it today is like admiring a circus from the rafters: the spectacle is undeniable, but the emotional tether is frayed. Beck released  Midnite Vultures  in November 1999, just as the millennium tipped into view. He was coming off  Odelay , a critical and commercial triumph that set expectations impossibly high. Critics braced for another reinvention. Inste...

I’ve been working on this for a while. Not the writing, not exactly, though the words have been circling my notebooks and margins for months, but the thinking. These two books by Joseph Conrad,  Heart of Darkness  and  Lord Jim , have been following me like companions, sometimes silent, sometimes whispering. They are works I can’t seem to shake. I read them years ago, returned to them recently, and found that the older I get, the more they seem to know about me. Conrad wrote them back-to-back at the turn of the twentieth century, but they read like halves of the same question.  Heart of Darkness  looks outward, to empire and its horrors.  Lord Jim  turns inward, to a single man’s shame and longing for redemption. I think Conrad needed the second book because the first hadn’t finished speaking. He diagnosed the sickness of empire; then he wanted to know what that sickness did to a soul. And as I’ve sat with these works, as someone who has lived through ...

I laughed the first time I saw it. Not out loud, but internally, that reflexive flicker of amusement you feel when something looks like the setup for a joke. Two Napoleonic soldiers, back-to-back in exaggerated postures of surprise, a hat on the ground, a well between them. It felt staged. There was a kind of timing to it. The composition had the rhythm of a punchline, like a military-themed skit paused before the reveal. But then I noticed the blood. And then the monk. Just like that, the comedy curdled. Jean-Claude Bonnefond’s painting doesn’t reward a quick glance. It punishes it. The initial tone, composed, quiet, and almost humorous, turns out to be a setup. But the joke, if there ever was one, is on you. Bonnefond was a technician. He painted with the clarity of someone trying to show you everything, but not all at once. A painter of the Lyonnais school, he prized realism, a tight brush that left no stroke behind. In this piece,  Military Event from Napoleon’s First Spanish C...

The first time I watched The Mission, I didn’t think about treaties or papal politics. I thought about weight. A man lashed to his own past, muscles trembling as he drags a sack of armor up a cliff while the falls thunder beside him. On another day, I might have rolled my eyes at the obviousness of it. Sin, personified. Guilt made metal. But the longer the camera holds, the more the body persuades. We believe in burdens because we know how they feel. When the Guaraní cut the rope and the mass tumbles away, the release arrives first in the lungs, then in the mind. It is melodrama built from effort, not speeches. You forgive him because you’ve wanted that moment for yourself. The story is simple and not simple. Eighteenth-century South America. Jesuit missions were built among and with the Guaraní. Two empires redrawing borders as if land were a chessboard. Jeremy Irons plays Father Gabriel, a quiet priest who offers music before he offers words. Robert De Niro plays Rodrigo Mendoza, a m...