Fragments
by Brian Segal
You had better write it down before your mind locks it up and throws away the key.
Walking down Crescent Street in Montreal at about 3:00 in the morning circa 1971. The colors and slightly mad thoughts of psychedelic drugs Click to continue »
Watch a fascinating 20-minute documentary about American photographer Laurie Toby Edison by Kyoto, Japan-based filmmaker John Wells. Edison speaks with Rebecca Jennison about her work in conjunction with the exhibition “Meditations on the Body” at the Osaka National Museum of Art.
By about ten this morning, outside the Click to continue »
Take This Bread
by Sara Miles
Reviewed by David Roche
David Roche on Take This Bread:
—Sara Miles is a storyteller, and her story, written in a tight, wonderfully readable style that she honed in her reporting years, is about food . . . Yes, this book is good enough to eat.
—She nails a core aspect of New Age spirituality when she describes it as “spongy”.
—Her prayers are not words but actions.
—She is not saintly. She can be testy, edgy, judgmental, with a touch of arrogance. But that’s the way prophets are supposed to be. Miles’ conversion is a flawed floundering.
—Her descriptions of the food pantry scene and its human communion are vivid, at times heartbreaking, but always respectful.
Women En Large & Familiar Men
Body Image Photography by Laurie Toby Edison
Says Laurie: Women En Large is my statement on the female nude, at least for now, and Familiar Men is my statement on the male nude. The five years I spent photographing men and talking with them transformed my vision of masculinity in this time and place, as well as how I perceive the body in my work.
Green Onions, Yellow Onions, Self-Esteem and Murder
by Lynne Murray
My new motto is Self-Esteem Through Murder, but I should explain that I’m a mystery writer, so the killing is theoretical. In fact, I’m the kind of wimp who keeps a glass jar and cardboard around to rescue bugs that wander into my bathtub.
I do write murder mysteries. (They don’t always get published, but that’s a whole different rant – don’t get me started.) My first mystery, Termination Interview, published in 1988, had a heroine who was, like most fictional female sleuths, very athletic. I modeled her appearance after a Wonder Woman type Aikido practitioner acquaintance (except for the nose ring). I figured a mystery heroine would have to be very muscular in order to fight off bad guys.
There was a fat character in that book and I had a hard time describing her. I spent literally hours on one sentence and never quite said what I wanted to say. What I ended up with was this:
Filed under: Art Gallery
So, What’s With The Goldfish?
by James Geary
The goldfish in these pictures were my pets from about 1985 to 1988 when I lived in San Francisco. “Sometimes, two goldfish in a bowl are enough” is an aphorism that originally appeared in my collection of poems, Words for Refrigerator Doors (e.g. press, 1985). At the time, I was working alternately as a van driver and typesetter for a photography studio in South San Francisco, and consequently learned a lot about taking photographs. I had the idea to photograph my goldfish in symbolic locations around the city. If two goldfish in a bowl are enough, I thought, then they should be enough anywhere. So between October of 1986 and September of 1987 I traveled with them to a variety of locations in and around San Francisco and took their pictures…
