The Tragi-Comedy of “The Big Short”
Seeing the movie adaptation of “The Big Short” last night transported me back to a decade ago, when I made a regular habit of leaving my road bike in the garage and hopping instead on my upright city...
View ArticleThe Bible Under the Bridge
A Bible, abandoned, tattered, weed-strewn. Found by Houston-area artist and photographer Patrick Feller as he climbed along a bank to get pictures of an old railroad bridge crossing Interstate 45....
View ArticleIntrusion From Time Past: A Review of “45 Years”
We spend perhaps unconscionable amounts of our adult lives marveling at the passage of time, continually shocked at the zip line that seems to have transported us from our 20s to 50s and beyond in a...
View ArticleOh, the Troubles I Seen: A Photo Essay on Labor and Toil
Short of being completely disabled or extremely young or elderly, we must work. From the lowliest worm to the sparrow to kings and queens, we have to get after our daily labor. In one form or other, we...
View ArticleCuriosity, Holiness, Science: An Homage to Eve
A recent scene at my neighborhood pool: It’s closing time and the lifeguards are rolling the tarp off its big spool and laying it out across the water. A 3- or 4-year-old boy bolts away from his mother...
View ArticleDark and Resplendent Nights: A Study of Van Gogh’s Two Cafés
Decades ago, when I had my head buried in theology and philosophy at Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, I used to regularly wander over to the Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue, a kind of...
View ArticleFourth Annual Holiday Photo Gallery
There were times this past year when it seemed, well, it still seems, I must admit, that the world took a step or two backwards on this jagged evolutionary trail we have been traversing over the eons....
View ArticleHungary and Syria: A Tale of Two Diasporas
We are born into a particular place to particular people, absorbing the world we find and then habituating to its rhythms and requirements. The routine of being cared for intimately in a state of...
View ArticleArtist of Repose: Sculptor Tinka Jordy’s Profound Humanist Vision
Sculpture, like all other art forms, has always ridden along on historical waves of style and sensibility. It both joins in with and helps to direct the prevailing currents unique to any given era. Not...
View ArticleThanksgiving Eve, Sonoma Coast
*** *** *** *** *** Check out this blog’s public page on Facebook for 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied by lovely photography....
View ArticleFifth Annual Holiday Photo Gallery
I launched this blog just after Christmas five years ago with the intention of seeing where it went over the course of the next year. When that year was up, I felt moved not only to keep on going, but...
View ArticleWhat Is “The Shape of Water?”
What is the shape of water, anyway? Liquid, right? No, wait, “liquid” isn’t a shape, it’s a quality, like “flighty” or “rambunctious” or “wildly imaginative,” isn’t it? Or is liquid a sound, like that...
View ArticleBringing Joy to “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens
THE SNOWMAN One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The...
View ArticlePhilippe Petit’s Art of the High Wire, and the Artworks It Inspired
At root, we go to art, whatever its form, to be changed. To alter our perception, to see something new or something we have seen before in a new way, to contemplate the mysterious, the beautiful, the...
View ArticleA Visit to Duke Gardens
Like a lot of aphorisms, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” has such perfect pitch and rhythm that we rarely question whether it is altogether true. It is no doubt partially true, given that...
View ArticleLight and Dark in the Arts: What’s Your Pleasure?
A small group of us was discussing possible movie choices for the upcoming weekend a few nights ago when one person floated the possibility of “Chesil Beach,” the adaptation of a dark Ian McEwan novel...
View ArticleThe Holy Ground of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
“I saw people throwing pies in each others’ faces, and I thought: ‘This could be a wonderful tool. Why is it being used this way?’” So says a lanky, exceedingly soft-spoken Presbyterian minister with...
View ArticleThe Solace of Rainbows
Don’t know about you, but I feel myself wearying of being in the dark thrall of a mad man. (Making that two words was intentional—he’s just angry, and thus engenders none of the empathy and...
View ArticleSixth Annual Holiday Photo Gallery
“Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing,” wrote the culture critic and free-range intellectual Susan Sontag in 1973. Were Sontag alive today (she...
View ArticleOn “Rocketman” and Artists, and Rocking One’s World
Prodigies rarely have it easy. No matter how much fame or wealth they may manage to accumulate on the basis of their outsized talent, they often wind up leading desperate lives, besieged by an inner...
View Article