John Outterbridge, a truly great artist, died on December 23. He was my friend for many decades and a friend and mentor to the entire community of Black artists in Los Angeles and to artists throughout the county and even the world.
Arts & Cultural Critique
Becoming Each Other: Why We Need Riva Lehrer’s “Golem Girl” Right Now
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Phillip Barcio reviews Riva Lehrer’s new memoir “Golem Girl.”
Arts & Cultural Critique
Jacob
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You emerge changed from the battle, but beware believing that changed means improved.
Ecological Transformation
Harmonic Convergence
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Sandra Bass reviews Michael Nagler’s “The Third Harmony: Nonviolence and the Story of Human Nature.”
Politics & Society
Ruth Messinger Reviews Arthur Waskow’s Dancing in God’s Earthquake
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Arthur Waskow knows our potential and how far we have yet to go to realize it, and he is determined to give us food for that journey.
Arts & Cultural Critique
A Theory of Everything
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“Perhaps most of all, I miss discussing your theories, Nora. Under the spell of love and a dancing fire, our nude bodies warmed by burning oak and afterglow, we explored without telescopes or complicated mathematical formulas. Free radicals, you called us.” A short story by Ron Rindo.
Arts & Cultural Critique
Camus’s Other Plague: State of Siege
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The Plague’s apparent realism displays the ambiguity inherent in every allegory: the literal events in the narration occasionally get in the way of their presumed figurative meaning.
Arts & Cultural Critique
Funicular
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Oh merciful God, please don’t let me die before I’ve used Gaudi’s model in a poem that can outwit art like he cheated gravity & math.
Arts & Cultural Critique
Against Translation and the Ethics of Compassion
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“Against Translation” is a model for dwelling in the unknowable space of compassion.
Arts & Cultural Critique
Screaming Faces Made of Dots
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“I tightened my hold on the snow globe and then slipped it into my pocket. I had never stolen anything before, but I had an idea that the snow globe was meant to be mine—a consolation for the lost bird keychain—that it was a powerful artifact intended to pass from one Hannah to the next. That it had first belonged to the original Hannah, the one who was favored by God.” A new short story from award-winning author Becky Mandelbaum.
Arts & Cultural Critique
How can we protect what we love?
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How can we protect what we love? Deena Metzger reviews latest book by naturalist, Susan Cerulean, who faces the extremity of her father’s Alzheimer’s and the fate of Florida’s shorebirds — two perfect storms.
Arts & Cultural Critique
Death and Amtrak
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On a night train to Albany.
The cars slid North on the tracks
And rain splattered grime
Around the sealed windows.