To my mind it’s the earliest images that most compellingly evoke the wonder and complexity of the human body. People were closer to God then, more aware of the divine plan. Death was a part of daily life, not hidden away and sanitized.
ARTS
KEEPING THE PATHS CLEAR
. “Battouflet’s chief concern was the vegetation on the ghostly paths. Cutting and thrusting impatiently, his stick kept open a vestige of the vineyard tracks which would otherwise have been overgrown and lost. It was his single self-imposed task.”
THE INNER LIFE OF AN LA STREET PAINTER
“I don’t pretend to be van Gogh. I’m a commercial artist. I’m one of a thousand. I do simple landscapes to support my family. I don’t do what I want to do; I do what the people who buy my paintings like me to do. If I paint the Manhattan Beach pier ten times, I’ll sell all of them. If I paint the Virgin Mary, I don’t sell one.”
BACK TO WONDER: NOTES ON A MAGIC SHOW
I try to keep my eyes on his hands, which seem to be in sight at all times. Aha, he partly rolled up his sleeve! Wait, his palm was concealed for a second on an inner thigh! Is it possible for a human being to memorize the order of an entire deck of cards at a glance?
PHOTOGRAPHER JOSEF SUDEK, THE POET OF PRAGUE
“Luminous,” “mysterious,” “haunting,” “ethereal,” “otherworldly,” “timeless,” and “romantic” are a few of the words regularly applied to his work.
MY VERSION OF THE PULITZER
Since 1900, the Xavier Society for the Blind in New York City has been providing free braille and audio books to blind and visually impaired people worldwide in order for them to learn about, develop, and practice their Catholic faith.
TO CALL MYSELF BELOVED
“And all I ask for housekeeping
I get and pay no fees,
Leeks from the garden, poultry, game,
Salmon and trout and bees.”
THE GREAT FERMATA
At their first rehearsal after a two-year break, they wondered how they’d sound. But right away they started singing the “Kyrie” from the Frank Martin Mass and the music was right there. “It was as if that ‘Lord, have mercy’ had been resounding the whole time and we just picked up where it left off.”
MANNA IN THE DESERT
“True solitude is not the absence of people, but the presence of God. To place our lives before the face of God, to surrender to the movements of God, is to roam free in a space in which we have been given solitude”….
BUT BEAUTIFUL: ALTO SAXOPHONIST ART PEPPER
How did someone who seemed so seemingly morally weak and narcissistically disordered produce such sublime music?
AN INTERVIEW WITH–ME!
I put everything that interests me to use, one way or the other: martyrs, cults, women’s tennis, Scottish otter keepers, heroin-addicted jazz singers, cloistered nuns, serial murderers.
O ANTIPHONS AND MORE!
Here’s the obit for one Renay Mandel Corren who died December 15. It begins: “A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday.” I hope I get such a full-bodied tribute when I keel over.
COME FLY AWAKE!
The Pharisees’ goal was to be “good,” correct. excellent. Christ’s goal was to come awake, in love.
- ANGELUS NEWS
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THE FREE WORLD
“[Louis] Menand himself seems not much to admire any of them. Is he saying that, given an unlimited amount of freedom, this somewhat uninspiring group—the way he paints it, anyway—is the best that post-WWII Western civilization was been able to produce?”