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CategoryArt in Society

Posted Art and Spirit

A Surprise Communion across Continents, Classes, Centuries, and Cultures

. . .In dejection from all the awful and discouraging news about reactionary political victories, rampant viral sub-variants, catastrophic droughts, and increasing violence (as well as, for me, unhappy views about my own self), I found myself doing something that I’ve done on occasion over the years, especially under stress:  I was hand-writing, long past midnight, a list of my favorite artists and mystical writers.  That exercise can calm and comfort me. not just as an obsessive-compulsive ritual, but as a reminder of real treasures that I’ve been given, for inspiration and illumination.

Posted Art in Society

Memorial Day Is an Occasion for Grieving and Respect, Not for Celebration

If we really want to honor those whom our country has sent to war, we should honor their suffering, which usually goes on long after they’ve returned from the killing fields. And we should mourn the lives that they destroyed at their country’s command in what may have been a war of aggression for an unjust cause, as in Vietnam and Iraq (or, for Russia, in Afghanistan and the Ukraine). And we should do a much better job of caring for them once they’ve returned to us, providing the treatment and care and training that they need, instead of the all-too-often shameful conditions that exist in the institutions that we’ve set up for them to stay in if they need such shelter and therapy, and if they have nowhere else to go for those essentials.

Posted 1 Comment on Art as Our Priceless Exchange of Gifts Art and Spirit

Art as Our Priceless Exchange of Gifts

The poet, essayist, translator, and magazine publisher and editor, Robert Bly, died toward the end of last year.  I think it’s unfortunate that he became best-known as a father of the “men’s movement,” because in the public’s mind that overshadows his tremendous contributions to American literature.  His literary work in all the capacities that I just listed had a tremendous and priceless effect on me and others, opening up the cloistered world of an American poetry controlled excessively by stiff-minded academics to the timeless and global world of a poetry of imagination and spirituality, of what Bly called “news of the universe.”

Posted Art and Spirit

Towers and Devices of an Alien Race

I want to introduce you to a new portfolio of mine: “Towers and Devices of an Alien Race.” But I don’t, don’t want to squeeze it into an ill-fitting box of conceptions or drown it in chat about techniques or influence. Still, I want to tell you a few of the thoughts and feelings that I had in making these works.

Posted 1 Comment on A Christmas Approach to Street Photography: Gifts Given, Gifts Withheld – Post 2 of 2 Art and Spirit

A Christmas Approach to Street Photography: Gifts Given, Gifts Withheld – Post 2 of 2

I miss the pleasures of meeting people in doing my street photography.  Various factors have kept me from it almost completely  for several years:  a major change in the nature of my paying employment, a new office location, a much-needed surgery and long rehabilitation, the pandemic.  But I have to say that my experience, mostly on the streets of downtown Hartford, Connecticut, wasn’t all warming and satisfying, though it did call to my mind aspects of the life presented in the Gospels just as much as did the better parts of my portrait-seeking experience.