Nothing like a trip-and-fall while traveling…
ARTS
A SHORT WALK
Speaking of travel, I myself am setting off next Tuesday for a two-week jaunt to the East Coast! A bit of a working holiday as I’ll be visiting lots of museums, gardens, and suchnot, but I’d do that anyway.
- ANGELUS NEWS
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LA’S ACADEMY MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: At last, LA is poised to have the museum it has long deserved: the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, opening Sept. 30. I love that they’ve named it the Museum of Motion Pictures: not the Museum of Film, which would have skewed hoity-toity and auteurish; not […]
POULENC’S OPERA: “DIALOGUE OF THE CARMELITES”
The opera was worth every minute of the 3 hours. The acting was superb; French maestro Manuel Rosenthal conducted. But it wasn’t the music that stayed with me. It was the Reverend Mother’s death—so excruciating as almost to be unworthy of her; so NOT a traditional martyrdom.
WE LIVE ON: STUDS TERKEL’S HARD TIMES REVISITED
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Hard Times. Terkel, famously, travelled around the country talking to, among others, itinerant farmers, seamstresses, field workers, burlesque queens, con men, speculators, and union organizers.
STAYING THE COURSE
“My yoke is easy, my burden light”–but take it up, though you’ll often look like an ass carrying it.
PAOLO VENEZIANO: ALTARPIECES AT THE GETTY
Venice was an important center for the pigment trade. The best ultramarine, or lapis lazuli, came from Afghanistan. This deep, brilliantly saturated blue was much more expensive than gold at the time and was typically reserved for very important commissions: the robe of the Virgin in the Getty’s “Annunciation,” for example.
ALL SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES ARE CALVARIES
“I picture the silence of certain souls as being like vast places of refuge. Finding themselves at the end of their rope, wretched sinners enter there gropingly, with their last drop of strength. They can sleep in peace and then leave refreshed and consoled, with no memory of the great invisible temple in which, for a short while, they have laid down their burdens.”
CHAMBERS OF WONDER
the Holy Father’s prayer intention for July is Social Friendship:
“We pray that, in social, economic and political situations of conflict, we may be courageous and passionate architects of dialogue and friendship.”
NOTHIING BUT THEE
One year the Catholic Press Association had me as a speaker for their annual awards conference. I went up after some guy from EWTN who crowed about having recently expanded the station’s reach to 18 trillion or something like that. When I got up there, I laughed, “Well, my own media empire is a bit smaller…I operate it from a desk in my bedroom that’s about four feet long”…
MAGELLANICA
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: Magellanica is a five-part, four-hour audio drama, streaming for free through June 30 on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Sticher and other major podcast platforms. Adapted by the award-winning playwright E.M. Lewis, from her 2018 World Premiere play, the drama is based on an actual expedition: the scientists […]
CONNECTING THE EXILES
Subscribe if you like to my YouTube Channel. I’m going to call it my Demented Catholic series and hope soon to be an “influencer!”
SO MUCH WE DO NOT SEE OR UNDERSTAND
I also learned only recently that pineapples don’t grow on trees. “They’re grown from the center of a leafy plant. They are an aggregate fruit, which is formed from a cluster of flowers, or inflorescence.”
I mean after a lifetime of opening Dole cans, who knew?