In sixth grade, my friend Amy Osborn’s parents took us to a screening of Annie Hall. The bedroom scenes with Carol Kane, Janet Margolin and Diane Keaton were chaste by today’s standards. The repartee was so beyond my frame of reference, it caused but little discomfort.

George Carlin was more than a Class Clown. He was also a class act, as evidenced by this undated missive to comedy writer Sally Wade, with whom he shared the final decade of his life. The man who once parsed the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television showered his “spouse without papers” with such notes daily.

David Foster Wallace was a hyper-anxious chronicler of the minute details of a certain kind of upper-middle-class American life. In his hands, it took on sometimes luminous, sometimes jaundiced qualities.

Andy Stewart builds boats with his own hands for life-affirming reasons. It’s a way to make inanimate objects come alive, to breathe new life into our world. But Stewart also enjoys the challenge of it all. The sea, he tells us, is the “final arbitrator” of your work.

A couple of days ago, Mick Fleetwood told NPR that a band’s greatest hits belong to its fans “to be reinterpreted and create a backdrop for parts of their lives.

Considering the possibility of a truly proletarian art, the great English literary critic William Empson once wrote, “the reason an English audience can enjoy Russian propagandist films is that the propaganda is too remote to be annoying.

The relationship of movie star to critic isn’t always as parasitic and fraught as you might imagine. Witness Tilda Swinton bouncing around the Virginia Theater in Champaign Illinois, urging audience members to get up and dance in honor of the late Roger Ebert.

Few of us possess the physical strength and even steelier will to follow in the handprints of professional balancer Jaakko Tenhunen, but most of us have other projects that could benefit from the sort of relentless determination he brings to his work.

Would you take advice from William S Burroughs? What if it were filtered through the humanistic sensibilities of Patti Smith? Addressing the crowd at last summer’s Louisiana Literature Festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the punk poetess shared some good counsel laid on her in her youth by the Beat’s highest priest.

These days any yahoo with a cell phone and access to the Internet fancies him or herself a Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ruth Orkin or Helen Levitt, but true street photography involves more than just being in the right place at the right time.