• General Nonfiction

    Onwards to 2016 With “Gratitude” for Oliver Sacks

    December 30, 2015 - By 

    Every passing year sees the passing of more people from our lives. Whether from death, ruptured or merely faded relationship, or the loss of the person we once knew because dementia has robbed him or her of that cherished personhood, we come to the final days of a year and amid our looks back, as joyous as some of them might be, we are also reminded of loss. As an additional reminder, news programs highlight the more prominent people who have died, displaying a list of names and faces as the year’s final credits roll. Among those names this year,…

  • Odds & Ends - Visual Arts

    Third Annual Holiday Photo Gallery

    December 24, 2015 - By 

    In my earliest days as a journalist, words were the thing. If meddlesome editors and art directors wanted to attach photos to the small ink marks of the alphabet that I committed to paper, fine, that was their business, but frankly, I could not have cared less. Seas of gray were fine by me. That was not the only matter I was young and dumb about back then. But I won’t spend any more words elaborating on that here—it’s time again for the Holiday Photo Gallery! Lights! Cameras! So much beautiful, nuanced storytelling action, oh my! Here’s just a brief…

  • Painting & Sculpture - Politics/Culture

    The “Memorial Flag” Art of Dave Cole

    December 20, 2015 - By 

    In his 2005 work, “Memorial Flag (Toy Soldiers),” Providence, Rhode Island-based Dave Cole (born 1975) gives expression to just the kind of moral conundrums all great political art points to. Sometimes, such art adopts a powerful point of view towards the conundrum (think of Picasso’s fiercely anti-war “Guernica”), while other times it rests with merely noting a deeply troubling question or perspective while allowing viewers to grapple with it as they will. Cole’s “Memorial Flag” painting strikes this viewer as decidedly more the latter. Cole created what he considers an actual flag rather than an artistic representation by melting together…

  • Politics/Culture

    Running From Fear: Islamic Jihad and the Purported Doom of America

    December 17, 2015 - By 

    Watching the entirety of the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night and then reading the transcript the next morning, I felt compelled to check my passport and a calendar to make sure I’m not living in Poland in 1939, right after Hitler’s armies moved in with their tanks, robbing us of our sovereignty and destroying our way of life. To hear the candidates tell it, we have never lived in more perilous times, nor has our country ever been in as sad-sack shape as we are now under the craven and cowardly leadership of President Obama. Ben Carson: “We need to…

  • Music

    Happy Centennial, Frank Sinatra

    December 13, 2015 - By 

    Frank Sinatra turned 100 years old yesterday, and there was ballyhoo aplenty in the media and various entertainment circles taking note of the occasion. Not that Frank was alive to hear the accolades, but as famously dismissive as he most always was of praise and the gushings of adoring fans, he surely would have been pleased that the scrawny Mama’s Boy From Hoboken that he was left a body of work behind that would be duly noted and celebrated 100 years after his birth. And such an unscrawny body of work it was! Just one of the notable aspects of…