Holiday was no poster child for political correctness. She frequently chose—in fact, sought out—men who abused her physically and emotionally. She was notoriously profligate with money, food, and space, sharing her apartment at times with pimps, prostitutes, addicts. Her fondest wish was to have kids, open a home for orphaned children, and have her own little supper club, maybe 200 seats, where she could feed people and sing.
Instead, she was “existentially correct”….
“[S]omeone who has been truly wounded by the Gospel, and has personally verified that the Church preaches the Word and makes the death and resurrection of Jesus present through the paradox of agony and contempt, can never find a pretext to desert. The one who leaves the Church proves he has never entered.”
I found this quote in a book called C.S. Lewis’s List: The Ten Books That Influenced Him Most. It’s from the chapter on Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. I instantly recognized myself and realized Oh, maybe that’s why I find human contact draining! “The older I grow, the more clearly I see that this […]
“All conspiring without a plan,
unmapped siren channels
through a city at your feet. “
Come on, you know you’ve been dying to!!
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins: Pasadena native Mary Lea Carroll has written two engaging books on saints. The first, Saint Everywhere: Travels in Search of the Lady Saints, came out in 2019. In it, she travels among other places to Siena (St. Catherine), Prague (Infant Jesus) and Medjugorje (Our Lady of […]
THE FIRST DESIRE LINES HALF-DAY WORKSHOP HAS ARRIVED: SAT. DEC 5, 2020, 8:45 AM-1 PM PST!
Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins: Arcosanti has been called an “experimental city,” ” an “urban laboratory,” a “caravanserai.” Seventy miles north of Phoenix, the 25-acre compound, built on a 4,060-acre land preserve, rises from the desert like a mirage. The project was the brainchild of “visionary” Paolo Soleri (1919-2013). Arcology—a concept combining […]
“I am a question-asker and a truth-seeker. I do not have much in the way of status in life, nor security. I have been on quest, as it were, from the beginning. For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me: no ambition, no interest in tenure, always on the march, changing […]
Violinist Isaac Stern recalls watching Piatigorsky maneuver a cello through a narrow corridor of orchestral musicians. “He would hold it at shoulder height, straight ahead, as he walked—a magnificent gesture and a lesson to me in the need to establish a certain character of one’s own when coming onstage.”
Then I learned that when he died, a 40-plus-year-old letter from Riborg Voigt, the first woman he ever loved (of course unrequited), was found in a little leather pouch around his neck. That was when I knew Hans and I were soul-mates.
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. […]
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 […]
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.