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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I’m a darn good bread baker, but my early works could have passed for geologic specimens. Not soft sandstones or limestones either. These were metamorphics, loaves of the Grand Canyon’s Precambrian, nourishment that could break your teeth. The problem was I didn’t believe in the delicate properties of yeast, or its shelf life—or recipes, for that matter. I...
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It turns out Henry VIII was not a very nice guy. Living in the dark ages of human history that preceded Tweeting, his version of the short and nasty was to chop off your head. Or eviscerate you. Or burn you at the stake. He is remembered most of all as an inveterate ladies’ man, but scratch the surface and you find a narcissist, an irascible whiner, a boy...
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