We leave you with some wise words:
Never give up
No matter what is going on
Never give up
Develop the heart
Too much is going on in your country
Is spent on developing the mind
Instead of the heart
Develop the heart
Be compassionate
Not just to your friends
But with everyone
Be compassionate
Work for peace
In your heart
And in the world
Work for peace
And I say again
Never give up
No matter what is going on around you
Never give up
I couldn’t quite get a grip on the author’s character and personality or understand why she wrote the book. Topics that might have enriched the story in ways that profoundly connect writers to readers, that illuminated the human condition, casually slid across the page and then disappeared. For instance, in her autobiography, Leon Bing never tells us how not knowing who her father was impacted her emotional life and the choices she made about men. She doesn’t speculate how her mother’s parenting set the stage for the success and failure of her own mothering, or tell us much about how the two most important people in her life–her daughter and mother–related to each other. She doesn’t talk about the emotional, intellectual or psychological snags of being an only child ( Her mother and daughter are also only children.) Every career move happens as if by magic and certainly without effort: Mary Leon simply goes out to dinner, meets celebrity and then the next thing you know she’s a runway model or out on assignment for Harpers and Rolling Stone.
There were mixed messages. For one, she engaged in serial adultery, got very enthused about the creativity or wealth or sexiness of each lover, and at the same time espoused high standards about ‘the right way to live’ and the need to (more…)
After about an hour of wandering around rooms reminiscent of Cambridge Antique Mart (McGrath Highway, free entry, free parking) I found myself in the Manderley Bar, which is part of the production set, sat down next to a handful of equally confused looking adults and said:”Did I miss something?”
Glad to find release from their shell shock (shock at having spent $40 x 2 on a ticket, $7 x 2 to the City of Brookline, $5 to a ticket agency, $11 for parking, $2 to check coats, and $7 each for a non-alcoholic drink) they all answered: “I’m thinking the same thing!”
(BTW: the evening we were there a man was pick pocketed while he roamed through the dark rooms. Someone took his wallet and cell phone.)
SLEEP NO MORE, is a Punchdrunk and American Repertory Theater Production taking place in Brookline’s old Lincoln School on Boylston Street, through January 3, 2010. It is one of three shows in three different locations that have to do with a Shakespeare Exploded theme. The production has received mostly favorable reviews from the press and from attendees who post their reactions on the web. The half dozen people sitting at a table with me at the Manderley couldn’t figure out why the good reviews. (more…)
This film is an allegory for post-war Italians families with the message : get back on track with what’s important about family life; don’t make immoral decisions; be aware of the impact of your behavior on your children. If you’re not able to stand up to the responsibility of parenting, then the church will take over for you. It’s a classic Italian neorealist film put together by the famous director and screen writer Vittorio De Sica (who also made The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D, and the Garden of the Finzi-Contini).
Of course I thoroughly enjoy any film set in Rome, just because it is Rome. Here we stroll through the Pincio, watch a puppet show, visit a dressmaker, sit back while the housekeeper serves us up a big bowl of soup, and even go to a condominium meeting. What surprised me was that the film was released in 1944 (more…)
Early on in her students’ study of yoga, Dassa Oppenheimer teaches Pratyahara as an entry into Shavasana. Pratyahara is the yoga practice of ‘withdrawal of the senses’ from the body and from the environment . The practice facilitates the journey into the inner world where there are no loud noises, advertisement to buy, lists to do, and other things that might distraction us from our intelligent being. Dassa said, “If you don’t learn how to withdraw from your senses during Shavasana, you might as well sit in a chair and do something else.”
Here I will tell you how Dassa teaches us to use ‘withdraw our senses’ as the gateway into a surrendered Shavasana.
5 Five Steps to Pratyahara ( while in Shavasana)
1) Sight/Eyes. We begin with the most dominant sense. Lightly close your eyes and then lift the upper eyelid ever so slightly so that it does not press against the lower lid. This is difficult because when you lift the upper eyelid, you can easily tense the forehead. Do not tense the forehead. Slightly lift the outer edges of the eye toward the temple to avoid forehead tensing. Once the eyelids are in position and you are aware of a lightness around the eyes, roll the pupil downwards, as if looking towards the heart. No straining. Once in position, the eyes do not move.
2) Taste/Tongue. Relax the jaw. Let the tongue drop away from the palate. Do not hold the tongue back. The tongue tip nestles gently behind the lower teeth. Relax the corners of the mouth, letting the corners melt downwards toward the jawbone.
3) Nose/Smell. Bring your attention to the root of the nose. That’s the bridge of the nose. It doesn’t take long to relax here; just focusing attention at the nose’s root seems to relax the sense of smell. For help, image a dark warm circle—a black hole, if you like—sinking from the nose’s root into the brain.
4) Ears/Sound. Here we relax the inner ear. Bring your attention to the upper rims of your cheekbones. Allow the cheekbone to melt down toward the earlobe, which in Shavasana is the lowest part of your face. You will feel your inner ear let go of tension.
5) Skin/Touch. Skin is the largest sense organ. This step of Pratyahara teaches you to relax your face. ( Dassa says the results of practicing regular technique on the facial skin are better than botox). Imagine (more…)
Iyengar has called Shavasana*, the final relaxation pose, one of the most difficult. Why is it difficult? As serious yoga practitioners we strive to eventually be able to live outside time–inside time’s heart but disconnected from the past and the future: in other words, to be always in the present. Shavasana is training for this triumph.**
To do shavasana is to cut the threads that connect us to the concept of “I.” We become present but formless.
My yoga instructor, Dassa Oppenheimer studied with Iyengar in the 70s when his class size was no more than a dozen. She got a lot of direct, personal instruction that she passes on to us and stories, too. For instance she told us: “In class, Guruji liked to sit on my abdomen when I was in Urdhva Dhanurasana (the wheel, upward bow pose). ‘Look,’ he would say. ‘Oh, she’s a strong one’.”
I suppose that story let us know that despite her small size and elegance, she’s tough. Not that we hadn’t realized that already. We have been studying with her for decades. Her instruction possesses the sturdy, relentless drive of a master teacher who both cares for her students deeply but who also has little tolerance for lapses of attention to detail.
“No,no, no,” she says when we are about to stop sweating and are ready to close our eyes in a welcome, final relaxation.“How many times do I have to tell you!” She knocks our legs an inch further apart or a bit closer together.
According to Dassa, an improper shavasana never permits you to let go of your body, which is a necessary step in letting go of your thoughts and therefore entering timelessness.
10 STEPS FOR A PROPER SHAVASANA
1. From sitting to lying. Place yourself on the mat in dandasana, heels at the bottom of the mat. Align your body. Be in the center of the mat and your body. On your sit bones. Your hip bones parallel. Have a folded blanket ready at the head of your mat (or a prop that will lift your head & neck only as much as to be on the same plane as your spine, not higher.)
Going down from dandasana to shavasana is one of the few times in yoga that you are permitted to collapse your torso. Roll down from sitting, vertebrae by vertebrae, to a flat-on-your-back position.
2. Placing head prop Place the head/neck prop (more…)
Pasolini. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Why is he fascinating? Like other Italian intellectuals–or politicians–who you might put behind a podium or in front of a camera he is able to talk up a storm. (BTW: Italian politicians are known to go on for half days rather than hours). Theories. Politics. Right and wrong. Peasant values. Life. Religion. Police…He embodies what we are missing in the 2000s–a respected thinker. Instead we have celebrities who say little about the fabric of life but who are oft quoted on their food intake and love life. Much has changed in 40 years.
Along with being a prolific writer and a public intellectual, Pasolini was a mystic marxist catholic and atheist. The juxtaposition of all these elements, along with a keen intelligence and need to expose alternative sexuality and institutional hypocrisy, saturate his work.
Perhaps being a mystic was most important to him. In interviews he repeatedly spoke up for the need to deliver a mythological element to film. Back to Greek logos and mythos: logos gets too much air time.
Uccelacci and Uccellini embraces the complexity of Pasolini; completely pasoliniesque it is, in fact, a film that he has gone on record saying was his favorite. It is a comedy. It is a satire. It is a modern story that looks back on medieval times to gather momentum. It is an urban/rural clash story. It is a road-of-life story; a circular story. In the interview that accompanied the DVD, Pasolini said “I like to leave stories open…I choose everything.” Mostly Uccelacci and Uccellini is a father-son (more…)
After reading ARACOELI (truly brilliant novel), I became curious to know more about Elsa Morante. I did know a few tidbits: her friendship with Pier Paolo Pasolini;
her affair with the filmmaker Bertolucci; and her marriage to Alberto Moravia. Not much more. Many years ago I had waded through the first third of her difficult novel History . Since I couldn’t go to the end, Morante fell outside my interest and my corral of favorite Italian writers.
Just so happens this last month Lily Tuck came out with a biography of Morante–the first in the English language and a noteworthy recognition. Morante is underrated in the States. The angle of the biography is rather interesting. Tuck places herself in the biography. She starts as a child in Rome, sitting in cafes with her father, a filmmaker. Possibly Tuck sat across the table from Morante at a cafe in the Piazza del Popolo, but she does not remember for sure. The book plays off many possible past encounters with its subject Morante throughout its pages. Tuck also intersperses a narrative about her own experiences in Rome as she wrote the biography. Tuck, for instance, suffered a harangue from Morante’s ex-landlady when she ring the landlady’s doorbell during lunch time.
What sticks to me after reading the biography–besides recognition of her great talent– is Morante’s wild, stubborn, almost mean independence, her vanity, and her proud triumph over an economically thin and unusual background to become a writer on top of her world. A writer who, with the help of her ambitious nudgy mother, her body, (more…)
I never met a woman named Aracoeli. As I read Elsa Morante’s impressive and disturbing 1982 novel, of the same name, I wondered how to correctly pronounce “Aracoeli” and if it might be a common name for girls in Italy. My Italian friends Francesca and Renato both wagged their heads and fingers when I asked. “No,” they said. “It is a latin word. Imperative tense, a command, in fact that orders you ‘to look up to the sky’.”
And then, after finishing the book, I remembered having visited a church in Rome, located at the top of a hundred steps and to the side of the ‘wedding cake’ on Capoltine Hill: Santa Maria in Ara Coeli. It’s a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin for having given birth to the first son of God. At Christmas, pilgrims come from all over the city to adore the infant, play music for him,and leave him gifts.
The latin verbal command, along with the Blessed Virgin and child Jesus signifiers, are gateways into the novel, which like much of Morante’s work combs through childhood: how children look up to mothers who (at least in the beginning) love them unconditionally; and from that pinnacle of perfect the painful descent into adulthood. Life chips away illusions, fantasy, dreams, and family love.
The narrator of Aracoeli, a boy named Emanuel, laments that he is torn from the uterus but, as a reward for that pain, is glued to the wonderful teat of his beautiful mother, (more…)
Emory has study abroad program in Dharmasala
Several weeks ago, on Martha’s Vineyard, I attended a talk on Depressionm, Stress & Compassion Meditation given by Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, PhD, from Emory Univeristy’s Institute of Tibetan Studies. The gist of the talk: the pressures and habits of daily life all too often activate our flight and fight response. Compassion Meditation helps reduce modern stress.
One point made, which I would like to offer here, is chewing. Take time to chew your food. Macrobiotics recommend chewing food 50-100 times. Too, so do the stress & inflammation studies.
Eating fast—particularly eating protein (macros do not usually eat red meat) activates the fight and flight hormones, which ready the body for attack and action. Eating fast makes the body act as if it is under threat; soon to be attacked.
You can’t imagine why eating fast would signal an imminent attack? Here’s the picture: Human hunters who just killed a buffalo eat their catch quickly
Our oldest living Nobel laureate and the first ever to reach the 100th birthday
If you want to live to a 100, you might consider following Rita Levi-Montalcini’s routine: get up at five in the morning, eat just once a day, at lunchtime, keep your brain active, and go to bed at 11pm.
“I might allow myself a bowl of soup or an orange in the evening, but that’s about it,” she says. “I’m not really interested in food, or sleep.”
A diminutive, bird-like figure with an alert manner and engaging smile, Montalcini has the insight stamina and sharp intellect that someone half her age would envy.
This astonishing woman – who studied medicine, survived Fascism and prejudice, and went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1986, still takes an active part in politics
in the Italian Senate. I recently read her autobiography “In Praise of Imperfection:My Life and Work.” What touched (more…)
“All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.”
–Barbara Grizutti Harrison
This book is a good summer read….
Back in 1999, if I had not been asked to review Barbara Grizutti Harrison’s An Accidental Autobiography, I might have bowed out. From the get-go the tone shifts between being academic to sarcastic to tabloid confessional. At times it is overindulgent and haphazard (on page 52 Harrison calls Elias Canetti an Italian novelist: He is a Bulgarian Nobel Prize Winner who wrote in German!). Often, I had to check back to determine if I was reading Harrison’s own words, or if she was paraphrasing or quoting someone else’s. But–on about page 95–I caught her peculiar humor and found I was no longer pushing but was being pulled by her story. The remainder of …Autobiogrphy was eccentric, sassy and entertaining.
The book is not structured chronologically but alphabetically by topics beginning with Breathing Lessons, and ending with Swimming (more…)
he claims to be an ex-killer
Book Review: THE BLOOD OF LAMBS A Former Terrorist’s Memoir of Death and Redemption by Kamal Saleem
Reading The Blood of Lambs is like seeing a train coming straight at your house, your school, your gut, your bank account, and your children. I suppose you could put the book down and filter out politically incorrect thoughts, but that’s the problem. Put it down and, according to the book’s author Kamal Saleem, you will be an accomplice in the rape of your own nation. Radical Islam is counting on you not wanting to know what they are up to: clearing the world of infidels.
They hate Americans with as much passion as they hate Jews. Saleem writes, “Because if it were not for America, Israel would not exist.”
We realize that not all Muslims are extremists. However, according to studies Saleem cites, one in ten have declared war on our Western way of life.
The Blood of Lambs is a startling book, a nuanced version of the celebrated Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci’s trilogy. The Rage and the Pride, The Strength of Reason, and Fallaci Interviews Herself were her scandalous wake up calls to Europe. We might not remember that after 9/11, Fallaci spoke out against (more…)
Since we’re going to Italy, I am taking the occasion to write about one of my favorite “Italian Immigration Novels”. This one– IN THE GARDEN OF PAPA SANTUZZU — is more specifically a Sicily to American novel. My daughter will be enjoying Sicily during her spring break. I’ll be drinking wine in Roma and Bari.
“Cu nesci arrinesci” (He who leaves succeeds)
Tony Ardizzone’s novel, In the Garcden of Papa Santuzzu, is an abundant collection of magical stories and magnificent language woven together to create a extraordinary loving novel about not only Sicilian Americans but also the heartbreak and hope of common people who leave a home to begin again somewhere else. In Ardizzone’s case the people are poor Sicilian farm laborers who endure backbreaking work in the rocky fields of oppressive baruni. The place they migrate to is La Merica. The story begins as the character’s father, Papa Santuzzu and his wife Adriana, push their sons and daughters, one by one, to the land of opportunity and promise.
Rosa Dolci, Gaetanu, Luigi, Assunta, Salvatore, Rosaria and Livicedda Girgenti, Teresa Pantaluna, Ciccina Agneddina, and Carla and Gerlando Cavadduzzo all bribe their way out of the poverty of their island–one disguises herself as a man; another gains the help of enchanted eels (more…)
The boho-beatnik, boutique, food and folk music scenes of Greenwich Village have made indelible marks in the imagination of people everywhere. Less reknowned are the Italian-American immigrants who lived in the area around Washington Square and the stories about their lives, love, and rabbletrousing.
Carol Bonomo Albright, granddaughter of Italian immigrants, had an inside view on all of the going ons. She grew up in an apartment building on West Broadway between Prince and Spring. The building housed not only her family and grandmother but also 28 other families, all Italian except for a few (more…)
I first interviewed Dario Fo, in New York City, in November 1984. I brought an entourage along with me that included a photographer and assistant, an interpreter, and NY filmmaker Emile D. Antonio. We were going to do Fo. Fo of course, had his own entourage, and we all crowded into the dainty yellow and green parlor of his suite at the Plaza.
The Village Voice said they’d take a look at my story. No one, it seemed, at the time, knew about Fo. (I ended up selling an abbreviated version of the interview to Reuters, and a longer version, a year later, to Saturday Evening Post.)
Prior to his 1984 visit to New York, Fo, an Italian playwright and satirist, had twice been denied a visa. During our interview Fo said his previous efforts to enter the U.S. had been turned down on the grounds of “ideological exclusion.”
He added his entry had finally been made possible by President Reagan. “Mr. Reagan is an actor and understands it is bad luck to treat theater people badly,” he said.
Fo had come to New York to see preview productions of his play “Accidental Death of an Anarchist.” The play opened later that month at the Belasco Theater and starred Patti LuPone and Jeremy Irons.
For years I had been smitten by the work of Dario Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, having been introduced to a several one acts performed here in Boston, at a small, now non-existent theater in the North End, called the Nucleo Eclettico. The plays and skits written by both Fo and his wife are interactive, political and gutsy; they honor the audience and honor (more…)
excerpted from Jim Corbett’s story Life at Mokameh Ghat
“One night after my servant had gone into the kitchen I took a small hand-lamp off the dressing table, went into the bathroom, and there placed it on a low wall, six-inches high and nine inches wide, which ran half-way cross the room. Then I turned and bolted the door, which like most doors in India sagged on its hinges and would not remain shut unless bolted. I had spent most of the day on the coal platform so did not spare the soap, and with a lather on my head and face that did credit to the manufacturers I opened my eyes to replace the soap on the bath mat, and to my horror, saw the head of a snake projecting up over the end of the bath and within a few inches of my toes. My movements while soaping my head and splashing the water about had evidently annoyed the snake, a big cobra, for its hood was expanded and its (more…)
THIS TRIP SUSAN AND I DIDN’T FIND THE TIME TO GALLERY HOP. WE SAT IN OUR FAVORITE RESTAURANT ( NOT ALLOWED TO TELL THE NAME) AND DRANK MARTINIS, WENT TO MY READINGS AT NYU CASA ITALIANA AND THE CORNELIA STREET CAFE.
NYC IS ALWAYS AN EXPERIENCE…
A dragon: firescortched. In the tunnel=tail. The sidewalks=the scale, cracked, broken, catching Betty’s heels. Betty who is 90 wearing her small bone-colored shoes with pussy cat heels and pilgrim buckles. Sky scrapers like hives rise from eating too much. Humans? Professionals are its fuel. Young. Want to be. They’re everywhere. Apparent. Out front. Inside the restaurants at night. Night. Peopling in their going-out outfits, crawling on the dragon’s skin. Filling cracks. Checking text messages that allow them to be late–or not show up–for anything or everything. “I can’t make it. Sorry.” Fragments of glitter, precious stones, jewels like Jessi whose celebration begins at dinner. Late: 10 or after. A long work day, week. OK. Yellow dresses. Smooth brows. (more…)
BY LIBARY THING REVIEWER Amy Romanczuk
The Virgin Knows by Christine Palamidessi Moore
First off, any book that has a picture of Madonna and child on the cover, gets points with me. I immediately looked up the artist (Pietro Perugino) and the current location (Galleria Borghese, Rome) so that I could do a little armchair travelling and art appreciation. That done, I settled into the book.
It is an entertaining and interesting world Moore has placed between the covers of her novel. Though the pace was occasionally uneven, it was highly entertaining. The number of topics covered is slightly amazing: twin stuff, “mom always liked you best”, post WWII Italy, nursing (the image of a psychic OR nurse really made me smile), translocation, immigration, the old country, conspiracy, art theft, Roman Catholicism, men’s views of women, women’s views of men, love– as I said it was broad.
The title of the book is a nice play on words. While Alicia, the quinticential spinster/virgin knows all (though some of it is through psychic ability, it was (more…)
Turning. Turning Turning.
looking through a camera is like looking through the center of a vortex.
From who knows what realm of time, Michael Powell stepped into my circle. Here’s how: independent of each other’s urging, three friends–Karin, Goshia and Jean–ordered a que full of his titles from Netflix and are simultaneously watching his films,most of which were made in the 40s.
Funny, because the circle is Michael Powell’s point of entry.
Watch the pre-credits: an archer’s circle; an arrow hitting the bull’s eye; an eye; an iris; a camera lens. The story begins, the circle having drawn in the viewer.
The motion of swirling into a center, a center that threatens to swallow up the protagonist with madness, alcoholism, death, exhaustion, is (more…)
Viewers would probably benefit by having a sense of Italy’s history– and the history of Italian cinema–to get a good grasp on the film. Otherwise, it may seem uneven and spotty. If you haven’t already, I recommend watching Best of Youth, Fist in the Pocket, Bicycle Thief, Rocco and His Brothers, I’m Not Afraid and even Lina Wertmeuller’s Swept Away to put this film in context.
handsome fellows, aren't they?
Italian cinema has a tradition of basing their films on literature, classical drama, and political and intellectual concerns. As a cultural group, they are first to speak up about injustices of the status quo. Such is the case with Mio Fratello e’Unico Figlio ( My Brother is an Only Child).
It is a story of a family living on the outskirts of Rome. In the 60s and 70s things were pretty rural in the town of Latino; excitement resided elsewhere–Rome, for example. Within the family, there is the Communist brother Manrico; a fascist younger brother Accio; and a Christian Democrat father. The mother is work-worn and weary of living in government housing with walls that crack (more…)
Art Brut filmmaker
Few filmmakers have consistently rattled America’s schemes as sharp-eyed as Emile de Antonio has. By pushing to extract the poisons of Nixon, the media, Vietnam, Kennedy’s assassination, and the boggles in our political systems, from the 1960’s through 1989 he has created landmark documentaries about modern America.
His no-budget film about the Army-McCarthy hearings, Point of Order, became a favorite on the art-house circuit and established de Antonio as a principal voice in the counterculture.
I interviewed “D,” as he insisted everyone call him, several times in the mid-1980’s, first upon the independent release of his films to videocassette and later to collect information about men who marry five times or more. I am using quotes from those interviews in this post. (more…)
The concept of yin and yang describes the interconnectedness of opposites:
Japanese Yin and Yang
for example, light an dark, male and female, contraction ( yin) and expansion ( yang). It applies as well to social constructions such as good and evil, rich and poor, honor and dishonor. Applied to life, the concept can be a warning about the consequences of living on the edge. Extreme good will turn to evil; extreme wealth to poverty; extreme honor to dishonor, and so on. In the dance of these interacting forces, the best spot to be is in the center because the center is balance, peace, well-being. Only in the center can creation take place; only in balance can a human being exist in the present moment, unburdened of future tasks and past regrets.
Of course in the unfolding of life there is constant interplay between yin and yang. Yang gathers. Yin disperses. The interplay guarantees growth (more…)
(This story has been floating around for a while; it’s a good one about recognizing an artist when you see/hear one.)
4 mins later the violinist received his first dollar (more…)
Preview review from Italian Americana, (academic journal)Spring 2009The Fiddle Case by Christine Palamidessi Moore. Boston:/IAP Press, 2008. 243pp.
The Fiddle Case
In this coming-of-age story two nineteen-year-old women set out across the country in the summer of 1972, searching for answers about siblings they have lost. Their initial goal is soon overshadowed by the trip itself, reminiscent of Thelma and Louise. What begins as an upbeat adventure evolves into a dark thriller as they try to return a stolen fiddle to a cult member. The plot has many twists and turns, taking us across landscapes from Boston to Berkeley. The language conjures up images that titillate the senses: “sex was like a swirling tornado of white light.” Music of the time pervades; it is the driving force behind the road trip. References to politics (Watergate, Vietnam), to music (Beatles, B.B. King), to something as mundane as cigarette brands (low-tar Salems in Kentucky, Virginia Slims in California) convey larger meanings of the cultural background. The alliance between Anna and Cindy is central; other characters serve to illuminate their personalities or carry the plot forward.
Palamidessi Moore paints a convincing picture of the contradictions that women faced with the new sexual freedom of the 1970s. (more…)
Every now and then–even 40 year after the fact–groups of Japanese tourists stop on Oxford Street in Cambridge to take pictures of the famous steps, threshold, and doorway of The Love Story house
Now there’s a jean style–”Love Story” put out by Seven for All Mankind.
famous love story house of harvard lovers
The 1970 movie, “Love Story” starred an artsy Ali McGraw and jock Ryan O’Neill as a lovestruck Harvard couple from different sides of the tracks. The moive–and the book–were tearjerkers with a saccharin tagline: love means never having to say you’re sorry.
Down the block, Oxford Spa and the laundromat next to the spa were also in the movie and to this day have signs in their windows announcing their participation.
preview FROM Spring 2009 Italian Americana, cultural and historical journal. Do not reproduce any part of this review without permission of the author and publisher.
Old World Daughter, New World Mother is a provocative meditation on feminism: a symphony of intellectual, historical, economic, political, social, emotional, and personal aspects playing their part in a final creation that holds together not only the story of Maria Laurino, but also other ambitious second generation immigrant women–perhaps Italian Americans in particular, but certainly not limited to that ethnic group.
Laurino, author of the best selling book, Were You Always an Italian, (more…)
black painting
Another artist Susan so admired the snowy day in December when we gallery hopped was Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967).
Ad Reinhardt and Tony Smith: A Dialogue” December 12, 2008 — January 24, 2009 at the PaceWildenstein gallery on 57th Street.
Reinhardt is best known for his “black paintings,” (more…)
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