If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America?

Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are you look enough like our received idea of how Americans should look to duck the bite of the question. Unless of course you’re Jewish and your forebears haven’t mixed with Aryans enough, by force or choice, to give you that accepted, that approved look.

Things change, for better or worse. When I was a boy Rudolph Valentino’s foreign face had been romanticized into at least as much acceptance as pizza or kielbasa. But the stardom of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jennifer Lopez would have been harder to imagine. Harder still the stardom of Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry. (more…)

New York’s Hudson Valley and the nearby Berkshires and Taconics
are alive with art galleries. When people buy second homes in these scenic
treasuries they look to local galleries to provide them mementos of their new environment. They’re missing a huge bet.

If I were a fledgling or even a seasoned collector of contemporary and recent estate art I would comb these galleries as an alternative to the pricier Hamptons and Manhattan galleries where prices are driven up by overhead, including the high cost of taste-making.

Traditionally buyers look to the Hamptons and Manhattan to enhance their city homes or their investments. They tend to beautify their second homes with Hudsoniana or art relevant to the locale of the homes. This categorical mindset doesn’t well serve the buyer or the country galleries. (more…)

Have you ever wondered long after a party about that certain somebody you didn’t meet but can’t forget? This is the subject of Gatecrasher, my short story in the June issue of The Country and Abroad. The beautiful woman whose image accompanies the story is my mother, the artist Juanita Guccione.

I live in a house surrounded by its weed yards. Each spring I look forward to the happy dandelions so despised by the many. I even like the myriad puff balls they turn into. Periodically the farmer who cuts our grass rakes the thatch and spreads lime, but I use no chemicals or fertilizer.

Something is wrong with this picture. At this point it would be expensive to correct it, but the predicament heightens my awareness that a great many aspects of our culture are missing from the discourse we are reluctantly beginning about energy. (more…)

Municipal web sites tend to be passive-aggressive. In the guise of presenting vital information their subliminal message seems to be, And don’t ever say we didn’t tell you anything.

Rather than contribute to government transparency they tend to forestall inquiry by purporting to tell you all you want to know about the government you happen to be paying for. This is a ruse to distract you from all they’re not telling you. (more…)

Acting in its usual role as the national mind the press has decided that the rising fuel price is bad news, end of story. But it may be just the beginning of a much more important story.

Since the end of World War II we have built a society predicated on cheap gasoline. The suburbs sprawled inexorably into the countryside. Highways sliced and diced communities and farmland. Immense malls rose in remote spots, sucking the blood out of established commercial centers. Schools were consolidated into education factories, giving rise to huge bus fleets and loss of community control. A long-distance tourist industry developed. Small farms fell to developers and agribusiness combines. Agribusiness depends on huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas, and on diesel-guzzling farm equipment and long-haul trucks to take farm products to market. (more…)

Perhaps because social occasions usually feel like a ride in a cart to the guillotine I have developed an odd angle of vision concerning them. I notice, for instance, that the most important people are notable for their absence at funerals, weddings, award ceremonies, etc—mistresses, secret lovers, those who hate us for various reasons, good and bad, lost friends, failed friends. I identify with these people because I’d like to be one of them: absent.

With this angle of vision I guess I was bound to notice that one of our local newspapers, The Independent of Columbia County, New York, has taken to writing obituary headlines profound in their innocence. For example, one recent headline refers to a 94-year-old woman as having “loved the lighthouse,” and another says of a 70-year-old that she loved animals.

The great dailies of our time in their hauteur wouldn’t be caught dead writing such intimate and insightful headlines. What is really important about a person, after all, is what she loved. This elderly woman loved the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse and worked tirelessly to preserve it. And her local newspaper was unafraid to use the word love in a headline. How reassuring in a jaded age!

As a newspaperman it became clear to me over time that we celebrate the wrong people for the wrong reasons. The real heroes are under our noses every day in every town across the land, but we celebrate the gas bags, the obscenely ambitious, the people most successful at picking our pockets and bamboozling us. The heroes are often in the back wards of asylums, in cardboard boxes on the streets, in rest homes, in church soup kitchens.

Our ideas of success are worldly and rancid. So, good for the local newspaper that chooses to celebrate someone’s love.—DM

I’ve been opening the wrong doors lately—well, maybe it’s nothing new—but what is new is that I expect to walk into rooms I don’t live in anymore. I expect them to be just as they were when I lived in them. I don’t think I expect myself to be just as I was, no, just the rooms. And I’m finding it disturbing they’re not there, that this new, unfamiliar room is there instead.

I said goodbye to most of those places. I always do. I thank them for their hospitality and note the particular pleasures I’ll cherish. So that should be the end of it, right? I never imagine anyone else living in my old spaces, but that’s a symptom of egomania, so I’ll skip over it slyly. What interests me is the confusion: I expect things to be where I put them years ago in other places. Things have no right to change behind my back.

The strangest aspect of this is that I can’t find books in my library because they’re in all the different places they used to be in more than twenty different habitats. And the ones I’ve recently acquired are hiding behind the veterans. (more…)

I lead a walking around life, one reason I don’t need to travel much. Hudson, New York, my county’s seat, is one of those towns fraught with chance encounter. It could be with someone, something, or an idea.

One day recently, when our Canadian friends had whooshed a cool breeze our way, I was walking along Warren Street, Hudson’s main thoroughfare, the usual notebook stuffed in my pocket and a poem’s unborn heart pulsing in my head. It was one of those poems where you have a vision, but that’s all. Not a line, not a bon mot, not even a meter, but a vision. Do you have to explain it or just paint it?

I happened by the gallery Nicole Fiacco. I hadn’t noticed it before. I liked what I saw on the walls. It wasn’t the usual Hudsoniana people seem to think their country homes demand. I struck up a conversation with Ms. Fiacco and she turned her computer so that I could see work from a show she is about to launch.

The first image that caught my eye was a white house on a black hill. The luminous house had no detail, just this ghostly architectural shape on a hill. I was about to ask her about it when I saw a galleon that had clearly lost her helm and was about to fall over an apocalyptic waterfall, just as medieval mariners always feared would happen in accordance with their flat earth ideas. (more…)