Winter Park Library Photo Show

I have a show of my color photographs at the Community Room of the Winter Park Library for the month of February. My work explores the relationship between composition and color. I begin by composing the image through the lens, and then digitally manipulate colors, contrast, saturation, & crop for the final image. The result: fifteen 17 X 22 inch colorful images, your eyes will have fun!!

The Arts

Friends L & M recommended The Elegance of the Hedgehog to me, and a big thank you to them. This book contains the most extraordinary writing about the arts and the way the arts enrich our lives that I have ever read. I've read a lot of art history, criticism, essays, and this is The Best. A joy to read. The scoop: a lonely concierge in an up-scale Parisian condo has a secret life of arts appreciation, which is her lifeblood. Her observations on art, music, literature and film are fantastic. Lots of colorful characters, but the juice is her thoughts about the arts.

Lucky

Once again, appreciating how lucky I am to have been born in the USA. I read Shahriar Mandanipur's Censoring An Iranian Love Story. The initial conceit of an author writing a love story & dealing with the Islamic censors is catchy, but the book zeros in on a lot more. Mandanipur gives graphic examples of life under the Islamic Cultural Police, & the consequences of crossing them. It's horrific. The pernicious spying by neighbors & family reminded me of stories of life under the Stasi, and with similiar results: prison, torture, public hangings. Also, routinely used for political ends. He keeps coming back to the underlying love story, so it does have some hope.

I quite randomly followed this with Water Touching Stone, the second in a series by Eliot Pattison set in and near Tibet. These are mystery stories but are famous for telling the story of the on-going genocide of the Tibetans at the hands of the Chinese. This one expands to the plight of the nomadic Uighurs & Kazachs, with the same mistreatment: forced relocation, the nationalization of property, resources, factories (handed over to ex-Chinese military, now "entrepeneurs"), brutal oppression: torture, slave labor prisons, the forbidding of teaching or conducting business in indiginous languages. It seems endless, as does our country's tacit endorsement of these policies. How's your microwave? Inspector Shan, a Chinese escapee from a slave labor camp, is an endearing character, especially his relationship with some elderly Tibetan monks.