Consider the southpaw. She lives at first base, tends toward artistic genius, is only ten percent of the population but has occupied the White House six times in the last twelve presidencies. She is scorned, reviled, regarded with the utmost suspicion. In the Romance languages, she shares a Latin root with the word “sinister.” I’d like to shed some light...
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When I was a chubby six-year-old, I had a starring role in a little-known horror film called Blood and Guts. It was written, directed and filmed by a man whose friends and co-workers never suspected his Hitchcockian tendencies. He even had a walk-on role in the movie, á la Hitchcock, in which he played the part of a buxom nanny. This man was my father. We...
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Look at these faces. One of them could be yours. Look at the eyes. What do the eyes tell you that the mouth does not? Eyes are the epicenter of truth while the mouth pledges honesty to no one. Cover the eyes, as most masks do, and leave the mouth free to equivocate. Or cover the mouth with a band of bright color, an American flag, flowers, flames or...
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Story is how I move through unsettled times. Times when words like curfew, protest, tear gas, riot, fire, looting, violence, rage and justice take their place beside plague, pandemic, lockdown, quarantine, testing and n95. I write this on the last day of May, knowing that by the time these words come to you, four days hence, the world may have shifted...
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If we were to take our cue from the denizens of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, we would be making our way through this rubble of loss, grief, anger and uncertainty by creating art. The photographs of Mapplethorpe, called by some pornographic, though they portrayed the truthful flesh of the most vulnerable; the memoirs...
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