This process of testing myself in front of different pieces wasn’t just a matter of finding an image to fit my mood—the way you might scroll through a streaming service at the end of the day, hoping to find something that will scratch your particular itch. It was a process of clarification, of clarifying what I really thought and felt. In testing my own frame of mind against the framing of these artworks, I was distinguishing between what I was really experiencing and what I thought I should be experiencing, or saw others experiencing around me.
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Passages Part II: Berlin
At the bottom of the memorial, what I felt more than anything, I think, was a sort of fear. The fear of wandering through a world that had closed itself off. Of streets in which no window or door was open. Of storefronts no longer familiar or welcoming. The same remorseless facade around every corner. "I was walking along close to the walls," writes Kafka in his parable The Cell. "Although there were several doors, if one opened them, one only found oneself standing in front of a dark, smooth rockface, scarcely a handbreadth beyond the threshold."
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Happy Public Domain Day, 2024
In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (derisively known as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"). In a nutshell, the legislation extended the copyright on most published works from 75 years to 95 years. Immediately after it was passed, copyrights that had been set to expire in 1999 were extended for an additional twenty years. So followed two decades of public domain silence. This is the year that in many people’s minds, Disney gets its due.
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March 25th: A Feast of Feasts
Many Christians celebrate the Annunciation of the Lord on this day, and for years that was my only association with it. As it turns out, some combination of historical circumstances, fate, and tradition has placed a great deal of weight on this date, and the reason the Annunciation has been celebrated then is no mere coincidence but a participation in an older tradition preceding even the birth of Christ.
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O Solomon, I Have Vanquished Thee!
Once a church becomes politicized or commercialized, can it ever reestablish itself as a sacred place?
