Happy Kwanzaa + East Coast Blizzard

HAPPY KWANZAA! Habari gani.Photo courtesy of the Official Kwanzaa website.Kwanzaa, which has been around since I was a year old or so, is not a holiday I've regularly celebrated, though occasionally I have participated in friends' and community-based Kwanzaa observations in the past. More than anything I try to take its seven principles (the Nguzo Saba) to heart, and not just during the designated holiday week. The principles are ones I remember...

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Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas

Happy Holidays - Merry Christmas - Happy Hanukkah - Happy Kwanzaa - Best Wishes For This Season and Alwa...

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Rugby League Four Nations Tournament 2010 + Casula Powerhouse Body Pacifica Calendar

It's the holidays, which means its time for what one J's Theater reader once charitably called "rugby porn." Not real pornography, of course, just shots of ruggers running, tackling, scoring...and whatever else it is they do on the field. This year's Gillette Rugby League Four Nations tournament occurred in Australia and New Zealand in October and November 2010, months in which I was working diligently and postly lightly. This year's participants...

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Darnton's The Library: 3 Jeremiads + Brathwaite's Elegguas + National Book Foundation's New Reading Prize

Last spring I checked out from the university's library the esteemed Enlightenment historian and (Harvard University) librarian Robert Darnton's The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009) to gauge his arguments about the present and future state of the world of books and literature for my own edification and to preview it for a class. Darnton, one of the most important figures in his fields, has a gift for subtle...

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Carmen Herrera Paints On + Wojnarowicz Film to Travel

It sometimes is the case that great artists, especially highly original ones or who do not fit the artworld's templates and expectations, may work an entire lifetime and get little or no recognition or notice, and less remuneration.  Okay, that sounds a bit depressing, but here's a positive story, about Cuban-born, New York-based artist Carmen Herrera (1915-), discovered at age 89, that has been reported several times over the last year, though...

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"Disunion" (Civil War History Series) in the New York Times

I'm going to sing the praises of The New York Times today, and note that since October 30, 2010, it has been publishing one of the best and most informative series of articles, mini-essays, and nonfiction stories (tales, in the older sense), under the title "Disunion," that I have read in any newspaper, journal or other periodical anywhere, ever. The pieces, along with a timeline, interactive maps and documents, and photos and engravings, commemorate...

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Bye Bye, DADT! + Niemeyer's 103rd

There's been so little to celebrate of late with the current administration or the now lame-duck Congress, and the capitulation on the tax cuts for millionaires-to-get-an-extension-of-unemployment insurance for the most vulnerable Americans, during the winter holidays no less, was a particularly bitter pill.  But today proved that the government will not end the year only on low notes.Today brought one of the highest of the year thus far. Although...

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Quotes: Nicholas Carr + Richard Holbrooke

"The constant distractedness that the Net encourages--the state of being, to borrow another phrase from Eliot's Four Quartets, "distracted from distraction by distraction"--is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion  of our mind that refreshes  our thinking when we're weighing a decision. The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either...

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