On the Friday night before New Year’s Eve, my boyfriend and I were in line for the toilets at the techno club Berghain, in Berlin, discussing Buddhism. I’m usually skeptical…
If you had asked ten-year-old me about my favorite author, I would have replied unhesitatingly that it was J.R.R. Tolkien. The experience of reading The Lord of the Rings had been…
A French activist I know, a person with a flair for assailing the idiocies of modern life, someone who pines, though not romantically, for a trapdoor to a better world,…
For some months I’ve been living in Rome, up on the hill called the Gianicolo, which slopes down to the western bank of the Tiber. In antiquity it was the…
Al Gore once leaned in close, in a kitchen, late at night, at a party at a film festival, as someone snapped a photo of us. I never circulated it;…
Some years ago, before I became an American citizen, I held a visa that prompted immigration officials to quiz me about my work. These exchanges often went badly. If you…
The original Anthology Film Archives, on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, was designed with high black partitions between each seat, so that viewers could wall themselves in to the screen like…
“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.” I first read the famous opening lines of “Burnt Norton”—the first of T. S. Eliot’s…
When Roxy Music was recording “Street Life” for the 1973 album Stranded, they hung a mic out the window of AIR Studios above Oxford Street, but they didn’t like the…
My grandfather was a man who didn’t like to compromise. A rural Welsh boy who had made it to Cambridge University and then on to a career as a scientist,…
In the fall of 2014 I began attending hearings, some of them banal and procedural, others more emotional, for a Los Angeles murder trial that was cranking its way through…
“Let me persuade you to come to the place where tomorrow meets today,” a voice-over invites near the beginning of Design for Dreaming, a General Motors promotional film from 1956.…
There was a football game that afternoon at Buckley and though I can remember who I masturbated about on that early October day (I wrote it down—I kept lists, a…
After he finished medical school, my father left India, moved to the United Kingdom, and became a surgeon in the National Health Service. He specialized in orthopedics, which made Christmas…
Los Angeles is not “Hollywood,” and those who confuse the two should be banned from visiting. One quarter of California’s forty million residents live in L.A., which is the most…
A few months ago I introduced a screening of Robert Frank’s rarely shown and somewhat notorious film Cocksucker Blues at a cinema house in Los Angeles. Legally, the film can…
As a small child, I would sometimes sit with my parents in our suburban London living room and watch the six o’clock news on the BBC. One evening, I saw…
When I was a kid, we played a game: would you rather be given eternal happiness or told the secrets of the universe? I always chose secrets. In Eugene, Oregon,…
On May Day 2000, I participated in a “guerrilla gardening” action in London, digging up Parliament Square to plant crops. It was a utopian gesture—one of many made in those…
In June 1997, I boarded an all-night bus from the Port Authority to Asheville, North Carolina, with my friend Cynthia. We had no plan but to live there for the…
Facts, notoriously, do not care about our feelings. They are not subjective, but objective. The “I” who experiences emotion is located in time and space, the owner of a single…
The optimists went to the gas chambers (or so it’s been said). The pessimists went to America. The collabos went to Maxim’s (for steak). The orphans went to the country…
A young woman is waiting in her New York apartment for her fiancé to arrive and take her to city hall to get married. When he doesn’t turn up, she…
My first skis, at age two, were Olin brand, a fluorescent coral pink. They had no edges. Their sidewalls were pure white, like cut cake. They glowed, a special and…
Once upon a time in a galaxy not far from London, a group called the Association of Autonomous Astronauts was born. The AAA announced a bold “Five Year Plan for…
One of the few clear goods to have emerged from the social and political turmoil of the past decade is a collapse of faith in public opinion polls. Last fall’s…
It’s a dramatic scene. A man clings to the branches of a fruit tree, a look of terror on his face. He’s certainly in a pickle. The tree is bent…
One morning in September, a dapper Frenchman seated next to me in the garden of the Château de Tocqueville gestured solemnly at the front page of Le Monde, the house…
After New York City experienced record rainfall this summer, my basement flooded. Water destroyed boxes of books and manuscripts, sitting several inches deep in a plastic crate full of photographs.…