Category Visual Arts

Decades ago, when I had my head buried in theology and philosophy at Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, I used to regularly wander over to the Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue, a kind of rough-hewn and clattery coffeehouse with a 1950s pedigree, way before coffeehouses-ala-Starbucks got chic. The place had a kind of Mideast/Turkish vibe, the servers usually dark and mustachioed, the patrons hunched over their espressos with stacks of art books or Heidegger and Sartre philosophical tomes prominently displayed next to them on the round tables.

The “Med” wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, as it were, but its tone of brooding, vaguely discernible despondency and graduate school noir held a certain bohemian allure...

A recent scene at my neighborhood pool: It’s closing time and the lifeguards are rolling the tarp off its big spool and laying it out across the water. A 3- or 4-year-old boy bolts away from his mother at the gate leading outside and squats down poolside, gazing intently as the tarp unfurls. His mother calls to him, “O.K., let’s go!”

All he does in response is reach his hand out so he can touch the tarp as it moves under his fingers. His mother may as well be a million miles away.

I am smiling to myself at the whole scene, don’t even realize my smile shows until I approach the gate and Mom says to me, smiling herself now, “It’s so interesting!”

“Of course it is!” I respond. “And it’s so interesting that it’s interesting to him!”

She vigorously assents to this and we both laugh, marveling at the insatiable, seemingly undiscriminating curiosity of the young.

But re...

Short of being completely disabled or extremely young or elderly, we must work. From the lowliest worm to the sparrow to kings and queens, we have to get after our daily labor.

In one form or other, directly or indirectly, we bring the vegetables in from the fields, the meat from the plain, the water from the river, going about our appointed tasks to keep ourselves fed and hydrated.

Call it Darwin’s first imperative: Do what we must to get food and liquid down our gullets and survive for another day.

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Farmer Taking Banana Crop to Market, Uganda, by Robert Muckley

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Here in the West, we often conflate work with life itself—as our passion, our very identity. And we do so with a not-always-clear demarcation between it and the other forces of family, romance, leisure, and recreation that make competing claims on human time and energy (in civilized places, that is, like Canada, or Europe…).

Or we apply t...

We spend perhaps unconscionable amounts of our adult lives marveling at the passage of time, continually shocked at the zip line that seems to have transported us from our 20s to 50s and beyond in a long breathless moment when our eyes were apparently closed.

“Last time I saw you…” we begin, lowering our hand to toddler height as we come upon the suddenly grown children of friends and relatives we see only sporadically. And the kids smile politely, despite having heard the identical prattle a thousand times before.

British director and screenwriter Andrew Haigh gives this and other aspects of time a provocative, novel twist in his current (third) movie, 45 Years, starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a long married couple living out their retirement years in apparent contentment.

The film appears to be a slow-moving art house talkie but actually presents a rapid series of psychological and...

A Bible, abandoned, tattered, weed-strewn.

Found by Houston-area artist and photographer Patrick Feller as he climbed along a bank to get pictures of an old railroad bridge crossing Interstate 45.

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He had taken a different route when returning up the bank, through an overgrown area with thick vegetation and debris that suggested to him previous occupation by “those who had found some sort of shelter in the shade of this thicket.”

The Bible was open, stiffly, to Joshua 18, a brief chapter in the Old Testament describing the division of land to seven tribes of Israel which had at that time not received their allotment.

Joshua sent surveyors out to document the land, then cast lots to distribute each section, every tribe thus getting its due of God’s bounty.

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Someone had presumably been reading of this in the shade of a bridge, some 7,000 miles from where the events described in the book had ta...