According to Jasper Johns, his iconic 1955 painting Flag came to him in a dream (a rather literal one) in which he saw himself painting an American flag. The next morning, he went out and bought the materials to do it. Like many great works...
I grew up in a leafy first-ring suburb of a segregated Rust Belt city. My childhood lay on the sunny side of the Clinton years, my parents taking full advantage of immigration policies that favored highly skilled foreign workers.
Summer is the time of the child, a time to go barefoot in the grass, splash about in the creek, outrun the neighbor’s bull or the neighborhood bully. It is, even more gloriously, the time of the scamp, that subset in the Venn diagram of...