by Brooks Riley Of all the secondary discomforts imposed by the pandemic, the most treacherous may be inertia. Life, interrupted, can be characterized as an absence of movement, like a stream that stops running, stagnating as the surface begins to cloud with algae and other still-standing detritus. Inertia that stems from the current situation can…

by Brooks Riley We are not where we were one year ago—or have we just returned? This is the paradox of the pandemic: Lockdown has sent many of us on the wildest of journeys—not to a different place, but to a different self, even if such a destination is temporary. What if a consequence of…

by Brooks Riley The first time I ever left home without leaving home I was twelve years old, recently back from a winter trip to Mexico. Routinely sent to bed at 8 pm (my parents were old and old-fashioned), always wondering how to fill the inevitable two hours of insomnia, I opted to return to…

by Brooks Riley On January 28th of this year, just as the biggest black swan event of the century was about to unfold, the South Korean band BTS debuted their latest single Black Swan on CBS’s Late Late Show. Looking back on this moment of Jungian synchronicity, one might be tempted to ask, ‘How did…

by Brooks Riley Being Korean is a behavioral science all its own. There are formalities at all levels of society and potential affronts lurking in every social engagement. Ageism is set in stone, and in honorifics that define older or younger persons, friends, siblings and relatives, as well as differing levels of social standing. Personal…

by Brooks Riley Something has happened in the last forty days. The planet has gone quiet, a vast, reverberating, gesticulating global chorus suddenly muted by something wee and invisible which is borne across continents, streets and rooms by friends and strangers. Mass extinction, once the whispered woe of a distant future, suddenly sounds louder and…

by Brooks Riley 1. As the coronavirus continues to disrupt human life in many corners of the globe, a phrase from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah has wormed its way through the background noise of my attention span. It occurs in a Part III recitative usually sung by a bass with enough gravitas to shake the…

by Brooks Riley When Vienna‘s Albertina Museum exhibition of works by Albrecht Dürer ended in January 2020, it seemed quite possible that several of the masterpieces on display might never again be seen by the public, among them The Great Piece of Turf. This may sound like a dire prediction for a fragile work that…

by Brooks Riley A long time ago, on a mountainside in Liechtenstein, I tuned my transistor radio to the Deutschlandfunk, one of neighboring Germany’s state radio stations whose broadcast range leaked into that tiny country. This is what I heard: Hier ist der Deutschlandfunk, heute aus der Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. It wasn’t…

by Brooks Riley Now that the Emmys are over and we Americans have patted ourselves and a few Brits on the back for outstanding work, it’s time to consider one of the grandest achievements of the past year, a Netflix series from South Korea called Mr. Sunshine, which has, inexplicably, been ignored by media critics…

by Brooks Riley It’s not every day that a small, unexpected masterpiece shows up in your mailbox, arriving with the same modest ‘ping’ that announces the other electronic missives. This was no ordinary masterpiece. It was the photograph of a detail from Luca Signorelli’s fresco La Fine del Mondo on the entrance wall of La…

by Brooks Riley Racing down a German autobahn at impossible speeds is like running past a smorgasbord when you don’t have time to eat. Exit signs fly by, pointing to delicious, iconic destinations that whet the appetite but that one has no time for: Hameln, Wittenberg, Quedlinburg, Eisenach, Erfurt, Altenburg, Jena, Weimar, Dessau—markers of histories…

by Brooks Riley The attic of Notre Dame cathedral, with its tangled, centuries-old dark wooden beams, was affectionately known as the ‘forest’. The fire that originated up there last week made me think of an early Anselm Kiefer painting Quaternity, (1973), three small fires burning on the floor of a wooden attic and a snake…

by Brooks Riley Sometime in the late Fifties, Roman Vishniac, a pioneer of photomicrography, picked up a knife, cut a thick horizontal slice of skin from his own thumb and photographed it under a microscope using polarized light. The resulting image succeeded on two levels: the scientific parsing of human skin’s rich textural terrain; and…

by Brooks Riley When architect Otto Wagner commissioned this large painting by Carl Moll for the Kaiser’s personal railroad station in Vienna in 1899, he might not have seen the irony of an eagle’s view of the city. View of Vienna from a Balloon envisions a future beyond rails in which a bird shows the…

by Brooks Riley For most of us, the act of looking at a painting is, and should be, subjective. The baggage we bring to the confrontation–how we see, what we notice, what we know, how we feel, what we like or don’t like—is as individual as a finger print, and often highly idiosyncratic. Like the…

by Brooks Riley Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. —Peter Ustinov President Trump is no laughing matter. Paradoxically, he’s become just that, a side-splitting political earthquake triggering a tsunami of jokes and routines that fill the late-night air with barbs so sharp no ordinary ego might survive, the limits of humor now…