There are African elephants and Asian elephants, but nobody talks about The Great Invisible American Elephant whose herds roam the cultural scene.
There they are, standing in hospital waiting rooms, in news rooms, in class rooms, in back rooms. And here we are, navigating around them like waiters with a tray of cocktails over our heads. [...]
The fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis keeps ambushing us. As I scan the world wide web I see another rogue wave rolling in as homeowners ask themselves why they shouldn’t be given property tax relief in light of declining market values.
Read More... If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America?
Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are [...]
I dislike the term flash in the pan because if what looks like gold for a second happens to flash in someone’s pan I’m content to admire it that one time. If the sun glorifies green bottle glass I’m content that it’s not emerald. I like mica schist and fool’s gold as much as [...]
Read More...Do you remember The Gates (inset) in Central Park in 2005, that hydrology of orange banners installed by Christos and Jeanne-Claude? I don’t think anybody mentioned it at the time but it had a precedent among the Arabs. They used to hold great poetry competitions in which the poems were painted on vast banners. [...]
Read More...I live in a house surrounded by its weed yards. Each spring I look forward to the happy dandelions so despised by the many. I even like the myriad puff balls they turn into. Periodically the farmer who cuts our grass rakes the thatch and spreads lime, but I use no chemicals or fertilizer.
Something is [...]
Greg Palast, the outré investigative reporter, claims the Iraq war and the subsequent surge are a global swindle— read about it here— a conspiracy of government and industry to pick our pockets and to hell with the future.
How much truth there is in this, if any, remains to be seen. But considering the sheer amount [...]
Now that our planet, a betrayed beloved, is strongly suggesting to us
that unremitting consumerism may just dig us a hole to hell, we might learn a new way of living from the resourcefulness of children.
Have you noticed how children build whole worlds with stick and stones, how they improvise, making magic circles, giving strange animals [...]