MODERNISM, MADNESS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
THE MYSTERIOUS UNFOLDING OF REALITY All my life I have made lists. When I got my first computer in 1989, a Kaypro word-processor the size of a suitcase, my list making became more sophisticated. It was easy to cut and paste things I had to do in order of priority. I recently came across a […]
January 22nd was my mother’s birthday. Born in 1912, she would have been 109-years old. Also, at 9:00 AM it started to rain in Calaveras County on the western slope of the Sierra Mountains. It was a welcome event in what, so far, is turning out to be a pretty dry winter. At 9:05 AM […]
Accomplishment is the fruit of striving. Creation is the fruit of being. — Frank Rubenfeld Lately I’ve been experiencing interstices in time. These interstices come just after finishing something, a task, a conversation, a meal, and before fixing on the next idea or project on my mental to do list. Sometimes they come in the […]
Just six week ago my wife, Sharon, got the go-ahead from the Calaveras County Behavioral Health Services to expand an after-school arts program. She was given a grant to provide studio space, Monday through Friday after school, with free art supplies to high school kids living in our region. I volunteered to build large cabinets […]
Two weeks ago we had ferocious windstorm. Two majestic oaks (albeit already dead) crashed to the ground. The PVC pipe that feeds our rainwater cistern broke off and the orchard gate blew down. Fixing the gate, which was already falling apart, had been on my “to do” list for a year. Now I couldn’t ignore […]
Both Sharon and I have been stumped as to how to write about what we are experiencing right now, but we want to share it with you. (Check out Sharon’s blog post for her account.) We are ensconced in an apartment in a old stone chateau in the medieval village of Le Broc, halfway […]
On New Year’s Eve day I put my chainsaw in the back of our old pick-up and drove over to our neighbors to cull some firewood from a huge pile of branches and small trunks that Vicki and Dave cleared from their land. I wrote to you about Dave’s sudden passing a couple of […]
Sharon and I are taking the twelve days of Christmas as a stay-at-home retreat. We’ve been talking about what we are going to do with these twelve precious days and there’s the rub. We are so conditioned to “doing” in our world… buying presents, making dinner for friends, getting and decorating the tree and getting […]
1937 and 2018. Two creative communities, then and now. In the next post Paul finds a creative home in the London atelier of the man who become his mentor, László Moholy Nagy. I discover one in Richmond, California. Back in the day when I completed the final cut of a documentary film, I took the […]
Paul Weidlinger died of a stroke at eighty-five. At sixty-five I have been having intimations of mortality. I wrote about the passing of our dear friend, David, quite unexpectedly three weeks ago. His brain bleed started with a slight headache, nothing he thought he should be worried about until it was too late. I thought […]