My friend Dave, an artist and a walker, has an unerring nose for out-of-the-way spots to explore at leisure. A few months ago he started talking about a place with quarries and riverbeds and hiking trails by the confluence of the 210 and the 605. It was in Duarte, he said. He took the Gold […]
Month: February 2017
WHAT THE LEFT HAS FORGOTTEN: AN INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD RODRIGUEZ
I recently stumbled across this Salon interview, from December 15, 2013, with San Francisco-based writer Richard Rodriguez. Rodriguez, as you may know, is a gay Catholic intellectual. His 1990 essay, “Late Victorians,” is the finest piece of writing I know on the AIDS tragedy. The book referred to at the beginning of the excerpted portion of […]
PEACE PILGRIM
In 1953, a woman from Vermont named Mildred Lisette Norman gave up all her worldly belongings, took on the name “Peace Pilgrim,” and start walking. She described the picture that formed in her mind of the garb she should wear: a simple tunic with pockets for a toothbrush, comb, pen and a small pad of […]
THE ARTS AND CRAFTS TILE OF ERNEST BATCHELDER
The Pasadena Museum of History is featuring an exhibit, extended by popular demand through March 12, called “Batchelder: Tilemaker.” Ernest A. Batchelder (1875-1957) was an Arts and Crafts tilemaker who lived in Pasadena’s Lower Arroyo Seco and made fountains, fireplaces, and fixtures that can still be spotted in Craftsman bungalows and at various sites throughout […]
THE RAMONES AT THE GRAMMY MUSEUM
Talking to my little brother Joe on the phone recently, we began reminiscing about growing up on the coast of New Hampshire. Five years apart, we’d never known that as teenagers, we’d both kept a beat-up radio under our bed that we’d listened to, at the lowest possible volume so our parents wouldn’t hear, late […]
WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW
Here’s the link to a podcast I did with Ken Johnston of Malvern, PA, on January 17. Ken had me on an In His Sign radio show called “What the World Needs Now.” We talked about the one and only Mother Antonia Brenner and several other things.
ADDICTED TO TRANSCENDENCE
“Maslow distinguished between two types of self-actualizers: non-transcenders and transcenders. Nontranscenders were “practical, realistic, mundane, capable, and secular.” They were healthy reformers of life, but had no experience of transcendent “highs.” Transcenders, on the other hand, “had illuminations or insights” that motivated them to transform their lives and the lives of others. They felt a […]