James A. Reeves

Earl and his truck1But I'm still thinking about beauty, how it is incidental and cannot be contrived. Perhaps this is why I've suddenly become obsessed by the loose strangeness of Leonardo Da Vinci's Adoration of Magi, which I recently re-encountered in a Ken Burns documentaryLa pittura è mentale, Da Vinci said. Painting is a mental phenomenon. A few roughly sketched lines can evoke an entire world behind the viewer's eyes, but Da Vinci was more interested in the interior worlds of the faces on…

The Agony of Eros was my first encounter with Han's philosophy, and I was especially struck by his argument that, despite being a trendy thing to say at dinner parties, capitalism is very much not a religion. Every religion operates with both debt (guilt) and relief (pardon). But capitalism only works with debt and default. It offers no possibility for atonement, which would free the debtor from liability. The impossibility of mitigation and atonement also accounts for the achievement-subject's…

The Venus of Willendorf, a 32,000-year-old symbol of beauty that shimmers beyond vecchie signore che balla.1Nine years ago, I was unexpectedly alone in Rome so I spent the day at the Barberini, where I consumed so much Bernini and Caravaggio that my brain was stunned into silence by all that fleshy marble and bloody oil. When I reemerged into daylight, something shimmered at the edge of my vision, a glittery squiggle that had not been there before. The shimmer became a swirl that shrouded my…

A drawing of puppet angels by David Leo Rice1At my Thursday night Men's Spirituality Book Club, we've been debating the recovery cliché that "acceptance is the answer," which sounds so limp and lazy.But I'm learning that acceptance is not passive. Wearing the world as a loose garment requires a difficult and oftentimes exhausting stance that makes room for total inflow: the mental shred, pixellated heat, and humiliating muck that comes with being alive in this absurd century, not to mention the…

Under the Eye of the Big Bird begins as an austere fable in the vein of Woman in the Dunes or Never Let Me Go, then it unfurls into its own strange creature. Centuries pass. New modes of consciousness emerge.“My brothers, my father, my mother—they all wanted to be understood. But as soon as I truly understood them, they started to hate me for it. To them, being known was the same as being controlled.”Better than any thinkpiece about the future, Kawakami conjures the horror and wonder of our…

C's dreamy hands1Parking garages are the most frequent setting for my dreams. Sometimes they are crumbling. Sometimes they are flooded. Sometimes I find my parents there. I'm always trying to find my car. Last night I dreamt I was walking the jetway to an enormous Korean airplane when I keeled over because of an unholy pain behind my face. Several people were inside my mouth, writing strange graffiti across my teeth, and I frantically tried to get this under control before my flight departed.…

Klimt’s masterpiece is his rendering of Judith with an expression so seductive and relaxed it's defiant. The dot of light in her eye and the glint of her teeth give the picture such an electric presence, the severed head she cradles becomes an afterthought. Flat and graphic, entirely modern—drenched in mythic atmosphere but very alive.

A. with his father, learning to cook1My first memory is sitting in a high chair in front of a small Zenith television. The opening credits for a sitcom played, maybe Happy Days or Laverne & Shirley, and there was a shenanigan that involved kissing a mannequin. It scared the hell out of me, and I screamed until my father patted my head, called me “big guy,” and changed the channel. For years, my mom couldn’t take me into a department store because I was so horrified by mannequins. Much of our…

I often find my father deep within the labyrinthine architecture of parking structures. I once woke in tears from a dream about hugging him after he told me I could always find him there. I asked him about the afterlife and he smiled. This was the closest I’ve come to experiencing a visitation.

Figures hunch in the murk. One looks like a two-and-a-half legged woman. Some squeeze their hair and others fondle eggs. But the blank spaces in his roomy pictures does most of the work because these tormented bodies are all Pils wants us to see.

Last night’s dream brought me to the ruins of a university where we played chess with pieces of tandoori meat. “You cannot withdraw from this game without suicide,” said my veiled opponent.I dreamt that I drank perfume and had a minor role in a detective show in which none of us could remember the name of the president between Johnson and Ford.I dreamt that each of my fingers had its own consciousness.

I ducked in and out of tiny record stores, spinning racks of cassettes and flipping through stacks of vinyl, frantically trying to find my favorite song. Turns out I was kneeling on it the whole time. Perhaps this dream was the result of my anxiety about having so many unheard songs in my queue—the lack of connection to an artifact, the impossibility of ever getting my head around music again.

C. and I were walking through a museum that might have been Versailles or the Vatican in the year 3000. Baroque galleries. White cubes. Abstract paintings at precise intervals. Screens in the walls adjusted themselves as we passed. We agreed, quietly and with some pride, that we were lucky to live in a society that could build such a place.She went to find a bathroom. I waited near the entrance to a gallery. It was one of those finger-wagging exhibits that tells you exactly what to feel, but…

Last night I dreamt tangled, deeply plotted dreams about rotted airplanes, teeth in the street, and a gigantic man who knelt down to tell me he was raised by a mountain and that I did not understand how to live. I asked him if I could bum a cigarette and he tossed me into the sea. I swam into the dark until I was rescued by an inflatable child who cried like a ticking clock.

It's so soft. And I already have "Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space" tattooed on my arm.

At the Tate, a mammoth tower of twentieth-century radios fritz and skip through stations. Meireles was concerned with the cacophony of the modern world. He built Babel in 2001. I wonder what he would build today. When I encountered the tower, the radios were tuned to Journey’s 1981 hit, an anthem we knew as well as our names—don’t stop believin’ called through the static while we stood in a circle, taking pictures.More

C. and I watched a stuttering videotape. Somebody warned us that we shouldn’t watch the ending because it shows how we’ll die. Everyone in the movie had the flu and was laying down to die. We stopped the tape. She sniffled. I coughed. I wanted to run, but she shook her head and took my hand. I put on a favorite record—A Million Miles to Earth—and we laid down.

C. and I watched a stuttering videotape. Somebody warned us that we shouldn’t watch the ending because it shows how we’ll die. Everyone in the movie had the flu and was laying down to die. We stopped the tape. She sniffled. I coughed. I wanted to run, but she shook her head and took my hand. I put on a favorite record—A Million Miles to Earth—and we laid down.

In January of 1995, I snuck out alone to St. Andrew’s Hall, where the militant thump of Phylyps Trak II drew me upstairs to the dark third floor. Club kids in overalls, drag queens in chartreuse wigs, a man in a three-piece suit—all lock-stepping in a grid, heads bowed before the bassbin like an altar, which I soon l discovered it was.Visit →

A fine-grained collision between existential anxiety and end-game capitalism—and a masterclass in dialogue. The first three minutes might be my favorite opening scene in cinema: cosmic horror soundtracks the ultramundane.Visit →

Scholar's rock, Qing dynasty1C. says it’s better to make tacos at home because we know what’s in them. But I think it’s the not-knowing that makes Taco Bell the spiritual choice.The sociologist Eva Illouz describes the imagination of our ancestors as “information-thin,” which is why they could conjure such intense visions of gods and ghosts. To fill in the gaps.Today we have “internet imagination.” Our brains cook in a vat of liquid crystal fragments, leaving no room to ponder the whole, let…

I’ve had more conversations about the human soul in the past six months than the rest of my life combined.

More and more, I'm interested in my dreams because this is where I can hear myself think.

"I guess the real question is: Does God believe in Himself?"