Fear and Loathing in the Art World

Two bags of grass? Check.

Seventy-five pellets of mescaline? Check.

Five sheets of high-powered blotter acid? Check.

Challenge, Dose and Adventure cards? What!!??

In a move that would put a smirk on Hunter S Thompson's face is a mixed media work of art that you may have seen in some form or another on the Interweb from Los Angeles native Jonathan Baldwin. And while we can no longer get into the mind of the good doctor we can delve into the mind of the artist.

Eco Art by Christopher Rodrigues @ NYC's RARE Gallery

New York City's RARE Gallery is pleased to announce ". . . all of you on the good Earth," an exhibition of Planets, a series of otherworldly photo-collaged digital images by British/Canadian artist Christopher Rodrigues. The show, which runs from June 30 to August 12, marks Rodrigues' solo debut at RARE.

The exhibition's title directly references the Apollo 8 crew's 1968 Christmas Eve address that was broadcast live from the Command Module during lunar orbit as the Earth came into view over the Moon's horizon. Much like the televised images beamed back to Earth during the mission, Rodrigues' focus is on a planetary view of nature, where the entire solar system is home to isolated, Eden-like environments, inherently sick places, and those made uninhabitable because of human interference.

Yes

Yes says I, said he in the swelling sun,
Wise old child dancing naked in the parade,

With wide eyes in sleepy land, stroking hymns in the night,
Blessed crocodile teeth rolling out through the fumes,

In Search of Jim Morrison

It was all about the Mona Lisa. That’s all I wanted to see in Paris – that Mona Lisa smile. Everything else would be incidental. I was bound to see the Eiffel Tower, I was bound to cross the Seine, and oh yeah, I had to pay a visit to Jim Morrison. I owed it to my roots and the boys back at the bar. I had stopped by to pay my respects to Sartre and Beckett at the Montparnasse Cemetery. Now on this muggy August afternoon I was seeking out the Lizard King Himself.

The Child is Father to the Man

'The child is father to the man.'
How can he be? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can:
'The child is father to the man.'

First Lines Second Thoughts — The Making of Americans

First Lines Second Thoughts is a look at the first lines of well known literary works. On second thought, do these opening words stand alone as poetry? Today we look at The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein. Published in 1925.

Subject: Barra

Walking barefoot
Upon the tile
Not a sound is heard
Only the pounding
Of the surf

Oscar Hijuelos Explores Identity and Language in 'Thoughts Without Cigarettes'

 by Teresa Puente

Writer Oscar Hijuelos read from his new memoir "Thoughts Without Cigarettes" at the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago in early June.

The author won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" in 1990, and he was the first Latino author to win that prize for fiction.

Cachao and Me

A prized possession: A signed photo of Cachao.

Israel Lopes invented the Mambo
Everybody called him Cachao
I didn't call him much of anything
as he died in 2008

Dead and buried
in the basement
of a house in Chicago
— Ashes to ashes
under inches of dust
Is where I found Cachao

American Life in Poetry: Column 325

  by Ted Kooser, 
U.S. Poet Laureate

Many of us have attempted to console friends who have recently been divorced, and though it can be a pretty hard sell, we have assured them that things will indeed be better with the passage of time. Here’s a fine poem of consolation by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, who teaches at Penn State.