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Art Done Right
Wherein I visit an artist who marches to a different dromenon. Dromenon, an old word that might change the way we make art. Dromenon: art done right. Art done so right that it not only provokes the...
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On the Road with the Refugees
Portrait of Syrian girls sleeping on the refugee train I snapped this shot as I traveled from Budapest to Munich last week. I look at the photo now with some shame. After days worrying about getting...
View ArticleThe Majority Is Always Wrong
• The majority is always wrong. • Be an independent thinker. • Check the facts for yourself. If I were a teacher, I’d introduce the school year with the above admonitions. Pick one and carve it into...
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World’s Youngest Climatologist
Every summer my parents piled us kids into our ‘53 Pontiac and coaxed it westward towards Jasper and up to the Columbia Ice Fields. The glacier was close to the highway in my earliest memories. But...
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Black Sheep Matter
I’m in a café writing this post when I spot a coin on the floor. No one’s picking it up—in fact they’re sidestepping it—because of course it’s infected with you-know-what. I’m reminded of a scene in...
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Hour of the Wolf
Hour of the Wolf, that famously dark film by Ingmar Bergman, has stuck with me ever since it first disturbed me back in 1968. An artist, plagued with horrifying visions and insomnia, fends off insanity...
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Hello darkness, my old friend
Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf depicted the witching hours of night as a liminal zone between sanity and insanity. Between life and death. If you appreciate Bergman, you probably have a working...
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Light conceals, darkness reveals
I crawled out on a limb last week by claiming to see better in the dark. I told the story of falling on my head, which knocked some sense into me, you might say. Because in that near-death experience,...
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Do you believe in heroes?
Fiction is a one lie after another. But if those lies are compelling enough, we’ll tag along with our heroes even as they start to stumble. Especially as they falter. Most especially when they fail...
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Beyond our Well-lit Lives
I hear, “hour of the wolf,” and I think, “fear of the dark.” Or the fear of not-knowing what’s coming. Of what monsters the dark might be hiding. In Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, the protagonist held...
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Low Road to Heaven
Jack Kerouac hit the road in the late 1940s. Back and forth across America, he and his hipster buddies went searching for IT. Post-war America had become—in the minds of the Beat Generation—a dark age...
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My best spin on darkness
Peter R. Nicholls ART To abide stoically in our darkest moments—strikes me as the wisest thing a person can do. I call it the “discipline of loss”. The thinking goes like this—we’re eventually going...
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The Unsuitable Bride
“Excuse me — my wife wrote that book.” That’s me pitching Pamela McGarry’s debut novel, The Unsuitable Bride. I’m in the bookshop chatting with the owner when I see a shopper eyeballing the exotic...
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Screams in the Night
A guest blogger on my site? Not in 13 years of “The Meaning of Life Blog”. Until today. Michael Worsfold‘s piece (a 3-minute read) does not concern writing or movies or the meaning of life. It is,...
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My Annoying Life
“What good is a life if you don’t use it to escape what’s wrong with it?” That’s feisty philosophy from the hero of the story I’m writing. Young Thor Gundersen wants to escape his lousy life. Good for...
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The Soul of Oscar Wilde
“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself,” said Oscar Wilde. Here’s hoping you’ll afford me the same right as I enquire into what best serves the...
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