The Big Picture and the Closeup

Things that help in the strange ecology of the contemporary serious drama: rolling premieres, black box theaters, foundations, and residuals. But in consequence the reviewer may have to go guerilla. As seen with Detroit, The Train Driver, and Bullet for Adolf.

The first car may frequently be more important in a young man’s life than the first sex. Sometime in the first two weeks of May 1969, my dad bought me mine, a well-used blue Chevrolet Nova. The car finally necessitated that I get a job, in order to pay for insurance. The following Monday I was at the gate of the Grove Street plant of the Ford Motor Company.

However, for sheer guillotine-like intensity and definitiveness of severance, nothing in our society, short of divorces and funerals, begins to compare to the moment when parents leave kids off at college for the first time.

Rolling arpeggios, a haunting theme, spectacular effects, Detroit at its swankiest, and my dad …

Detroit had my whole lifetime to get this right: Snapshots of the rise and fall of the automobile industry and its home turf.

Peccant judges have that effect on us; unless we demand inhuman judicial perfection on the one hand or endorse total judicial anarchy on the other, they force us to think in uncomfortable shades of gray. They pose big headachey problems. Which I guess is why in general we want our judges to be squeaky clean. Not because this is an assurance of great judging, but because peccant judges raise such unsettling issues, and we have enough on our plate.