Call yourself "Colonel" and declare that your fortune was left to you by Dutch burghers from the seventeenth century. Now you're a solid citizen, the embodiment of hard work and rugged individualism. You're no criminal. The criminal is the guy who comes up short, who gets caught, who fails to adopt a respectable cover.

Like a four-sided porch I'm open to all winds.

Self-reinvention is an essential trope of the American project, closely linked to another such trope: going on the lam. Both are regularly featured in movies and novels and suchlike. Criminals and persons loitering with and without intent hold a crucial place in the culture. For obvious reasons, the culture cannot endorse this behavior, even as it is in thrall to it.

I confess I prefer to engage with pictures which I've chosen myself out of the welter of unidentified pictures, without the intrusion of too much personal context - Ilike to be a detective, and dislike being an impresario.

All I know about 1970s New York City is that it's where I grew up, and you always have an umbilical connection to the time and place of your growing up. It was cheap, didn't have too many people in it, you could go to the movies or whatever on the spur of the moment, you could get by without working too much and especially without involving yourself in the corporate world.

Paris had more sex than most church-laden places, and more church than most sex-laden places. Parisians crowed about Travail-Famille-Patrie while frequenting brothels. They enjoyed visiting drag shows while clamping down on homosexuality. They celebrated romance while treating women like dirt. Many of these contradictions existed elsewhere, but I do think Paris ruled the hypocrisy championships.

Redheaded Peckerwood, which unerringly walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, is a disturbingly beautiful narrative about unfathomable violence and its place on the land