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I grew up before the Interstate Highways transformed how Americans experience travel.  Each time we drove south from Ohio in the wastes of winter, the route would take us along county two-lanes that are now mostly overgrown backroads.  It took us countless extra hours, with red lights and tractors pulling out in front of us – but we were able to see facets of American life that were revealing, naked, exposed -- the Colored Only drinking fountains that were dry rust, a poverty and desolation that transcended race, the motels and jukeboxes that our high-speed McDonalds cloverleafs would maroon in silence in the...

Each night as I sleep, I evidently watch five or six short films. Almost all of my focus has traditionally been on my experience as a viewer, as the experiencer of the dream.  But inescapably, I must also be executive producer, casting agent, set designer, screenwriter, and director. Who, after all, writes these dreams? Who decided to make the alley walls of brick, and slicken them with damp?  Who populated that airline terminal?  Who carpentered that precipitous stairway to nowhere? And beyond that, why upon wakening do I experience that almost palpable amnesia  – the dream I was just immersed in disappears...