Where have I been, people keep asking. Right here, it turns out, giving birth to two books I’ve been incubating for many months. If you’re on my e-list, you received a notice yesterday that my two new books, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The Wave, have been published. I’m almost too excited to type!

Both books can be bought for a 20% discount from a special page, a gift to my dear readers: to buy The Wave or The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future, just click the links in this paragraph and enter the discount code 76KPUKT8 when you check out.

The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future is non-fiction. One of its two main parts features 28 short chapters (most no more than a page or two) exploring emergent knowledge from many realms including commerce, anthropology, social science, medicine, spirituality, cognitive science, art, public policy, and others. Each chapter highlights stories, research, and emerging developments that point to a specific public interest in cultivating empathy, imagination, and community through artistic and cultural creativity. The Wave is speculative fiction: not utopian, because everything in it is doable, but a glimpse of this possible world that I hope will spark other social imaginations.

With all the negativity directed toward the Middle East in the United States, it’s easy for those with no personal connection to the Middle East to develop ill-founded prejudices and lose sight of the similarities between North American and Middle Eastern culture. Certain similarities go unnoticed, such as a love of family, music, good food, or even a belief in a Presence greater than ourselves. One of the major cultural similarities that we tend to forget we share is a love of story telling – a cultural tradition that we should celebrate as something we can all relate to.

How do we bridge this cultural gap? Maybe we could start with something as simple as a comic book?

Someone is already taking that step.

Unveiled by Jabal Entertainment at the 2012 Middle East Film & Comic Con and later picked up by major comic-book publisher IDW, Jinnrise by Sohaib Awan attempts to bridge the gap between East and West. By carefully and respectfully integrating stories from the Middle East with the Western art of comics, Jinnrise is the start of something beautiful and a definite step in the right direction.

"Red Panda" from the Kolor Kathmandu project. Credit: DAAS.

The red panda, a small mammal that is on the endangered species list, appears on a building’s side just above the Bagmati Bridge in Kathmandu, Nepal.

The mural was created by Daas, a transcontinental artist and entertainer who wanted to draw attention to this mammal that is fighting for its survival. “Knowing that thousands of people, everyday, will see this huge, colorful painting – in a sea of grey, deteriorating buildings – felt like I was helping to breathe new life into the city,” Daas says. “I wanted to give the people something to spark awareness as well as imagination.”

In 2007, Daas, who was born in the United States, caught the attention of Universal Studios in Osaka, Japan, through his work on large-scale murals. Executives welcomed Daas to their team of live entertainers and he now calls the Kansai region of Japan his adopted home. His life and experiences in his new home led him to create his most recent series of paintings “The Origami Dream,” which has been in exhibited in both the U.S. and Japan.

Salomon's self-portrait

Sunday, April 7, marks Holocaust Remembrance Day. This solemn day is commemorated annually by Jews around the world, recalling that from June 1941 until the end of the Second World War in Europe in May 1945, one-third of the world’s Jewish population perished in a systematic campaign of annihilation. But instead of acknowledging the impact of this mammoth horror on why most Jews support Israel as a Jewish state, many critics and opponents of Israel today denigrate this connection, with some even denying or downplaying the reality or magnitude of the Holocaust.

Surprisingly, much about this history remains to be learned. A recent NY Times article tells us that researchers have discovered evidence of “42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe,” rather than 7,000 sites thought previously to comprise this world of enslavement and genocide.

Suskind & daughter

In another few years there will be virtually no living witnesses. “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “Schindler’s List” are iconic portrayals, but many more dramas transpired as well. It shouldn’t surprise us that literary and cinematic remembrances still proliferate.

The life and death of a 26 year-old artist, Charlotte Salomon, reminds us of Anne Frank. Although not a diarist, Salomon documented her family background in Germany and her life as a refugee in vivid color paintings (known as gouaches), framed with bits of narration akin to a graphic novel, presented as if an illustrated script for an opera representing her life, replete with stage directions and musical suggestions. (Her stepmother had been an opera singer.) Real-life characters are given different names, and some plot elements may have been invented, but the basic narrative of “Life? or Theatre? A Play with Music“ encapsulates Salomon’s life. Opinions differ as to whether she had a romance with her stepmother’s voice coach, as her work suggests, or if an infatuated young woman let her imagination take flight.

And just as there are by now thousands of survivors and descendants of people saved by Oskar Schindler, there are a similarly large number of Jews who owe their lives to the ingenuity and heroism of Walter Suskind. But this Jewish Schindler, his wife and young daughter all perished.

Day of the Dead from the Manhatitlan series. Credit: Felipe Galindo.

Caught up in political debates surrounding immigration policy, journalists, politicians, and even fine artists often give short shrift to the cultural aspects of immigration: the beautiful blending of cultures, languages, and societies that enrich a country for the better.

Felipe “Feggo” Galindo’s series Manhatitlan offers a reminder that immigration is, at heart, about finding home in a new place – a process that inevitably involves some cultural fusion.

Created as a humorous blending of Mexican and American culture, the series was conceived of by Galindo after he started feeling a sense of nostalgia for his native Mexico City.

Born an hour outside of Mexico City, Galindo attended university to study art and become a cartoonist. However, most of the artists and their art in Mexico – and the United States – focused on various political topics and ideas. Galindo says his work is often not explicitly political, but he sometimes goes in a political direction if there’s something he really wants to say. On more than one occasion, he has come up with a concept that only later took on political connotations for viewer. Nevertheless, he says it has been a challenge to be recognized as something a bit different from a political cartoonist:

In Mexico and Latin America, being a cartoonist in those countries means being a political cartoonist in my field of work. In that sense I didn’t just want to do that, I wanted to have other ways of expressing my ideas. In Latin America, though, it’s unavoidable. If you say ‘I’m a cartoonist,’ they immediately think you are a political cartoonist. In New York, if you say you’re a cartoonist they think about the New Yorker magazine or something like that. The reference is different.

I was on the tarmac in Las Vegas, gazing from my window seat at the dusty prospect below. Ten yards away, three robust men in fluorescent pink-and-green vests and orange jumpsuits crouched in the shade made by the roof of an empty luggage-wagon, resting between loads.

The youngest jumped up and walked to a spot directly opposite my window. He pointed at something on the ground. From my perspective it resembled a small tangle of straw. Talking and gesticulating, he returned to his companions. One followed him back to the spot, then knelt down for an inspection. After a few seconds, he extended his index finger carefully, the way you urge a parakeet to perch on your hand. The bit of straw jumped onto his finger: an insect! The man tiptoed back to the wagon, extending his hand to his companions. The third man placed his own finger parallel to his coworker’s, and for a short time – gently, gently – they passed the insect back and forth hand-to-hand. Then, moving in slow-motion, the rescuer swept his hand back, keeping it parallel to the ground, then swooped it through the air, top-speed. With the energy of that boost, the insect took flight. The four of us watched until we could see it no longer.

At tables, during holy days, occupy our hearts with something new:

Let us risk a conversation in which debt is not considered shameful.

Grant us mutual release of any embarrassment that we aren’t rich yet.
Release us from the nasty shame that says debt is our fault.
Remind us to keep our resumes at home.
Keep us from reporting only accomplishments to each other.
Help us forgive all our intimates for not winning the lottery.
Help us redefine what it means to win.

Grant us some generous forgiveness for not being wildly successful and limit our
bragging to one self-referential story per hour. Move us beyond shame for being “poor”
or understanding how you can have a lot of food and still feel poor. Remove internalized
poverty from our table, where it sits next to the egg, the root, the parsley, the shank.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its annual awards last night, better known as the Academy Awards or Oscars (as if you didn’t know).

First of all, given my special concern for Israel, it was too bad that neither “5 Broken Cameras” nor “The Gatekeepers” won in the documentary category, but I had expected that they’d knock each other out in the ballot. Both are great in their way, and I’d have a hard time picking between them. If anything, “Cameras” and “Gatekeepers” complement each other, with the first focusing on Palestinians and the latter on Israelis. I haven’t seen “Searching for Sugar Man” (the winner), but it didn’t surprise me that it would win, as it was the only one of the five documentary nominees that was about a phenomenon rather than an issue; the other two contenders were about the AIDS epidemic and sexual abuse of women in the U.S. military.

As for the biggies, I liked “Argo” but would have preferred “Lincoln” or “Les Miserables” for best picture. The latter has a score and presents themes of love and revolution that stir me every time, and I was very pleased to see Anne Hathaway come away as Best Supporting Actress for a role, albeit brief, that was unforgettable. I would have been even happier if there had been a tie vote with Helen Hunt for her outstanding work in “The Sessions” (something that happened in one Oscar category); by the way, that movie’s star, John Hawkes, was robbed of a nomination for Best Actor.

It all comes down to this: no matter how you parse it – art, politics, spirit, planet; body, mind, heart, and soul – the realms that are reckoned separate in the official version of our current reality are in truth a unity, and recognizing that is the path to wholeness. When we violate – ignore, deny, falsify – the absolute indivisibility of our lives, we pay a crushing price. Daring to live into wholeness doesn’t guarantee happiness, of course. But it does confer freedom, the kind that comes from within and radiates in all directions. As Isaiah Berlin said, “Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.” Our specific birthright is freedom in the service of compassion. And wholeness is our aspiration, just as the seed aspires to sprout.

I have been thinking hard about this lately, as friends share with me the work of artists whose approach is embedded with this knowledge as beads are laid into the wax and wood base of a Huichol mask. And even more as I observe political work that is simultaneously spiritual work and simultaneously art work and the three are braided so closely that it is impossible to pass a hair’s-breadth between them. For instance:

Source: Wikipedia.org

Yesterday a bit of work stuff threw me for quite a loop and left me feeling like the world and life were in complete tumult. Then, this morning, after the storm had somewhat subsided, Jim Burklo’s latest “musing” arrived and I thought “Gee, if only I had known about dorodangos and gombocs yesterday!”

So, just in case my friends at Tikkun Daily don’t know about dorodangos and gombocs, here is Rev. Jim Burklo’s latest musing.