Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: A little of “performance art” can often go a very long way. So when a friend sent me an Art21 video by a Korean-born female artist named Kimsooja, I steeled myself. The adoption of a single name—Michelangelo! Madonna! Prince!—I did not take as a good sign. […]
ANGELUS NEWS
DIGNITY AND JUSTICE: UNPACKING IMMIGRATION LAW
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins: Linda Dakin-Grimm grew up Catholic, first in Riverside, then in Portland, Oregon. In college, she moved away from the faith, then became an attorney and for decades worked as a trial lawyer in high-stakes business litigation. She was partner in a prestigious firm, with offices in […]
HORACE PIPPIN
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: I first came upon the painter Horace Pippin on a trip several years ago to Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, an art collection and educational institution boasting one of the world’s greatest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modernist paintings. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), a wealthy businessman with cash to […]
BIRDS AT THE BASIN
“Follow the trail leading from the ‘stonehenge’ restroom/amphitheatre area south,” the directions run. “You can walk all the way down to the LA River, but if you do (the trail leads through a tunnel under Burbank Blvd.) be sure to go with another person.”
Naturally, I skipped over that last part.
ART WORTH DYING FOR: JAMES DICKSON INNES
Born in Llanelli, Innes studied at Carmarthen Art School and the Slade. A colleague there noted that he ‘was of middle height, black haired and thin featured, handsome to many people… there may have been something satanic in his look.”… He was already dying of tuberculosis, having been diagnosed at 21.
THE EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA OF MASKING
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: “If you invest in the marriage of the inner and outer worlds by putting honest energy into dreaming a dream on, all the people in your life, maybe the whole of humankind, is enriched, though it may not produce the result your ego was seeking. This […]
OLD-TIMEY QUILTS AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“If you think about a quilt like a sandwich, then the two pieces of fabric are the bread and what’s in the middle-wool or cotton filling-is the stuffing. All three layers are stitched together so the filling doesn’t move around. These layers trap air and act like insulation, keeping the person underneath the quilt warm. Although the quilt could be made of plain pieces of fabric, it’s usually not. What do you think you do to start making a quilt?”
I turned the fan up a notch and thought: “Hire someone?”
“THE LITTLE LOCKSMITH,” A MEMOIR
“Something had blazed in me, and from the blaze I discovered a new element in myself, a combustible something that would always blaze again in defense of the mystery and sacredness in things, and against the queer, blind, blaspheming streak in human nature which instead of adoring, must vulgarize and exploit and insult life.”
MOTHER LOVE
“The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them,” observed Chesterton. “The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.”
Who better to restore that doctrine than women, who carry the evidence for miracles in our wombs?
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
There are advantages to living in a house that’s been divided into eight apartments. If I croak alone in my kitchen, I’m not going to lie there till mummification sets in. If I didn’t show up for a day or two, someone would definitely notice.
THE SCAPEGOAT
My take on the current cultural imposition of a kind of martial law as to how we’re to speak, act, and think.
Let’s not forget that another name for Satan is the Accuser. And I hope everyone’s read Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”
A WALK IN THE WILDERNESS
“A shaded bench marked the end of the trail. I sat there for a while, feeling my heart beat. I thought about how the adrenaline of constant texts and links and tweets and bad news, bad news, bad news, is both toxic and addictive…Does anyone even read anymore?”
BUILDING ON THE CORNERSTONE
From a friend today: “I think of Psalm 127, ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders build in vain.’ Isn’t this the truth! Much of it, perhaps most of it we did build with Him, but there are foundational errors that need correcting.”
VISIO DIVINA: ARTIST MEL AHLBORN’S MADONNA ICONS
Artist Mel Ahlborn has painted a series of Madonna icons, each associated with a contemporary disease: Addiction, Dementia, B.C….and now Pandemic Madonna.