• Music

    A Deep Ache of Laughter: On the Razor’s Edge With Loudon Wainwright

    September 25, 2016 - By 

    One of the widely regarded hallmarks of great art is that it be honest and authentic, a true expression of the artist’s unique vision. The best art probes, focuses, explores, suggests, reveals. Sometimes that exploration and self-revelation plunges the artist too near scalding depths of pain and suffering, and the laying bare becomes too intense. The solace of drink, drugs, and the ultimate self-destructive behavior of suicide may then beckon.  (Van Gogh, Rothko, Hemingway, Plath, Woolf, Sexton, Morrison, Joplin, Cobain, Robin Williams; it’s a long casualty list.) Among contemporary artists in whatever genre, probably none explore their demons with quite…

  • Painting & Sculpture - Religion

    Curiosity, Holiness, Science: An Homage to Eve

    September 11, 2016 - By 

    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…

  • Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    The Lasting Emotional Weight of Childhood Memories

    September 6, 2016 - By 

    I’m 3-something years old, and my family is living in an upstairs apartment in Woodbridge, New Jersey. My dad is working two jobs, 16 hours a day, just a few years after we have immigrated without a penny in our pockets from a ravaged post-war Europe. There’s a howling nor’easter going on, buckets and buckets of rain. Probably some vestige of a hurricane. I have somehow managed to sneak downstairs and out into the little spot of dirt and concrete that serves as a front yard. My mom is no doubt occupied with my newborn sister, her fourth child in nine years, and I am roaming free. But as I’m looking up, I suddenly hear a voice…