There is a resignation in the cone of a white pine,dropped by its mother onto a clump of dried mown grass,which I arrange among my collection of spent things, white sap coating my fingers in resinous gratitude. I remember when… Read the full article
Help me lift my head upthat I might see the full arc of the sunone last time before I fall I want to watch the black rat snakecurl her tail around the base of the forsythiaand pull herself free of… Read the full article
We will stay hereUntil every last petalHas dropped from our stemsIn honor of flowers plucked from life too soonTheir pristine white and luminous yellow and red and purple and orangeEtched into the memory of a fading blue skyOf day turned… Read the full article
Blackbird singing in the dead of nightTake these broken wings and learn to flyAll your lifeYou were only waiting for this moment to arise Blackbird singing in the dead of nightTake these sunken eyes and learn to seeAll your lifeYou… Read the full article
Impossible to photograph the entire length of a tree’s tallness in a Redwood Forest. There is no vantage point from which to take in the details of each tree’s skin, branches, fingers, moods. The palpable energy of the forest, yet… Read the full article
I promised to returnto the shaggy mantle of grassthat binds yousurrounded by golf courses, which should amuse yousupine, facing westward hoping to catch the sunset,at least it seems that way to me. I wondered if a gravestone had been laid,wanted… Read the full article
Morning The Sikh soft kurti flowing, glances up as he passes beneath the balcony His grey wood staff, tapping the pavement, thrumming to the center of the Earth The morning’s light flickers through the trees and the wind chimes a… Read the full article
I imagined papering my body with the translucent skins of onions, the unsweet scent shielding me from predators, a perfume of protection to wear under my homemade clothes. Running a fingertip through the slick of olive oil on the bottom… Read the full article
I moved to New York City from San Francisco to run CBS Records’ Customer Merchandising department, a heady job for a young woman barely two years out of college, producing graphic and photographic merchandising visuals at the recording label that… Read the full article
On a dark and cloudy Friday morning six years ago, with the rain pouring down on the commons at Columbia University and students shielding their heads under umbrellas crippled by the wind, I holed up against the early summer chill… Read the full article
…I like to take long walks through the villages and cities I visit, taking pictures of street scenes and landscapes as I go. But mostly, I like to take pictures of people, stopping them to ask if they would mind…. Read the full article
The last (discovered) painting by Leonardo da Vinci, has arrived in New York City and if you live within walking distance, or are a bicycle, train, bus or car ride away, you can come to our galleries in Rockefeller Center… Read the full article
An Asphalt Shadow Self-Portrait remembrance of The Great American Eclipse. NOTE: I first published these photographs on my Ah, Nature…blog on Google+ on August 22, 2017. I have included more of the photographs from that shoot here, as well as… Read the full article
I spent the last two months driving back and forth between New York City and photographer Cheryl Machat Dorskind’s home in Westhampton, New York, shooting her in her studio and in her backyard, accompanying her on professional portrait shoots, a… Read the full article
I was fortunate to see the original production of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind at the Promenade Theatre in New York. When I first moved here, Shepard and David Mamet and Lanford Wilson were turning the NYC theatre… Read the full article
Circling Georgia O’Keeffe’s beloved Cerro Pedernal, with Abiquiu Lake behind and Georgia’s Ghost Ranch beyond the Lake in the distance. This sliver of rock jutting out of the mountains was one of her favorite things to paint. I tried to… Read the full article
“My paintings have the rising forms of the vertical necessity of life dominating the horizon. For in such a land a man must stand upright, if he would live. And so born and became intrinsic this elemental characteristic of my… Read the full article
I got the last copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad at B’s & N’s yesterday.
When I travel, I prefer to take photos of people I randomly encounter, rather than of sites I visit. To be sure, I have photographed my share of monuments and parks and churches and bridges, and I imagine I always… Read the full article
Madison Square Park, Sunday, November 6, 2016. An almost impossibly beautiful Fall day in New York City. You can feel the blue of the sky, smell the chill in the air, hear the trumpet of the elephant. That is…if it… Read the full article
How’s your handwriting? That is, if you’re not laughing by now…I mean, who writes anything by hand any more? Personally, I wish I never had to, because my handwriting is horrendous, worse than a doctor’s. I suffered early childhood trauma,… Read the full article
You haven’t had a burger until you’ve had a Sugar Burger. Somehow you have to get yourself to Embudo, New Mexico (some say Dixon, some say Velarde) beside the Rio Grande River between Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico to… Read the full article
I remember meeting Miriam (Miri) Dunn in the earliest days of G+. She would pop into one of my threads with a diverse array of moods – quick-witted, humorful, biting, kind, intelligent, strong, thoughtful…far too numerous to list. We shared many… Read the full article
In honor of Independence. Not the kind of independence that separates countries one from the other, but the kind of independence that celebrates clarity of self, autonomy of expression, release from influence, creative assertion and fluency, freedom of intellectual curiosity,… Read the full article
“I know these projects are totally irrational, totally useless. The world can live without them, nobody needs them, only me and Jeanne-Claude. She always made the point that they exist because we like to have them, and if others like… Read the full article
This leaves me breathless. May we have peace one day. Bless you Denis Labelle for this gift, this day, most particularly. #Tango #Dance #Orlando https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB-RS000NLs
I have been walking the streets of New York City since the day I moved here, never tiring of it, feeling its history deep in my bones, awed at the almost organic nature of its existence. In spite of the… Read the full article
What does it mean to be relevant?New?Hip?Of the moment?Au courant?Visionary?With it?Edgy?Young? None of these things means anything. Do not care about being young and hip and au courant and with it and edgy. Instead, grow old like Arthur Kern and… Read the full article
I love the intimacy of these gatherings. The appreciation dancers have for one another’s techniques, styles, steps. And of course the dresses and the shoes and the men’s suits. There is something that happens when partners dress up for one… Read the full article
There is much to be learned from communicating without speaking, using movement, music and the body to reach another. Last night I ‘watched’ the movie Casablanca by ‘listening’ to it instead of actually watching it. I was exercising on the… Read the full article
The philosophy Make Art, not War is one I grew up with. My parents were surrounded by artists, artists who worked obscurely at their crafts in the deserts of Northern New Mexico, artists who took a long time to make… Read the full article
“You’ve said that twice in the last 15 minutes,” my friend Hartley noted, watching me wolf down a spicy fish taco at Bill’s Burger Bar just off Rockefeller Plaza. “Said what twice?” I asked. “That you have two lives. You… Read the full article
E.B. White’s Here is New York has long been my favorite book about the city in which I live. Published in 1949,Here is New York is thought of as more of an essay because of its short length, a mere 56… Read the full article
This is the way I feel this morning. Smoky.
If you are an artist, inspiration can be found everywhere you turn. I designed these 18k rose gold weddings rings for pastry chefs, well known in Brooklyn (Dumbo and Cobble Hill) for their incredible cookies. Their store is One Girl… Read the full article
The Art of Standing in Meditation I learned to sit in Lotus Position, known as Padmasana, to meditate when I was 14. Crossing my legs in upon my thighs, one ankle over the other, folding my fingers into one of… Read the full article
Something a little dreamy
Under a mound of dirt you lay
I imagine a saxophone
Playing ‘Round Midnight
Maple trees line the road
Their shade saved for the living
While you lay beneath the blazing sun
As long as I’m in the Hip Hop Music Mood, or Mode, whichever you prefer, I might as well be in the Hip Hop Dance…
In the Summer of 2006, the day before I returned to New York after using my entire year’s vacation to study Italian at the Università per Stranieri in Siena, Italy, I took an early bus to Arezzo and spent the morning roaming the city taking pictures. After the cool early hours had morphed into lunchtime, I found a little trattoria on a small piazza where I could have a salad and a cold glass of Prosecco to ward off the heat that had begun to rise from the cobbled vicolos.
The Argentine Tango.
Attached is an optimistic article on Aducanumab, a new drug being developed by Biogen that (hopefully) shows the…
Good morning, everyone. After the Rain is a gorgeous Pas de Deux choreographed by the sublime Christopher Wheeldon. What if every couple were to approach one another – in every encounter – with the tenderness and sensitivity of husband and… Read the full article
…is in the air for all things in the natural world, along with a veritable sprouting up of things musical, theatrical, poetical and artistic, into which I immerse and disappear, wrapping myself up within, and winding myself ’round their various… Read the full article
This beautiful woman is Eileen Kramer. She is a choreographer and dancer. She is also 100 years old. I hope the beauty of her movements, the expressiveness of her hands, her arms…her body…are as inspiring to the Women of Google+… Read the full article
I watch the mesquite-scented smoke plume rise from the incense burner and remember Winters in the New Mexico desert.
I wait for the light. Everything is beautiful, but only in my room, not in Gaza. I’m ready to die in this room unless I find a better place. – Gaza Artist, Nidaa Badwan, of her more than 100 Days… Read the full article
Last Friday I posted a link to an Op-Ed piece written by Dr. Oliver Sacks an esteemed neurologist who has done a lot of work about the impact of music on the brain and the useful benefits of music therapy… Read the full article
It was from Dr. Sacks that I first learned about the magical, powerful, emotional and complex impact that music can have on our brains – that music is pre-lingual, that it can reach and stimulate areas of feeling and communication… Read the full article
Dance with yourself
It turns out that Doris Day, Bob Dylan and Emmy Rossum have something in common, which is an apparent appreciation…
I ought to have been born between the World Wars, when it was romantic to be sentimental, when having an attachment to the past was normal, when lovers would hand-write nostalgia-filled letters whenever apart, when taking a journey down a memory lane strewn with tales of adventures and friends and events long gone by could rouse a spontaneous and unembarrassed launch into Doris Day’s and Les Brown’s rendition of A Sentimental Journey.
Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce…
When I was in high school I knew nothing of poetry, except a schoolgirl’s frustration at not being able to answer…
On the Upper West Side of New York, across town from my apartment, rage foments outside of the Metropolitan Opera’s…
There is a serious downside to the Internet and this is one of them. What? Beheading is now the new “vogue” terrorism device, replacing the ever-boring AK-47, the old-fashioned suicide bomber, and the Oh So Ho Hum car bomber? What… Read the full article
“Certain things fall silent in us when we think that certain things are no longer possible.” – Frank Bidart, Poet,…
The Fogs of August
Lying heremy body feels like the Bell Tower in the Palazzo PubblicoStretching upwardto fly through the whiteLonging to reach the blueMy body a seed planted a foot beneath the soil,I can see a crack in the cobbled piazza stonesIf I could… Read the full article
As a matter of practical reality, I began working for money outside my mother’s home at 14, and I haven’t stopped working since. Hmmm…… Childhood is a fairly recent economic innovation. For most of recorded history, a vast majority of… Read the full article
I don’t watch much television, but these past few months I have looked forward to late Sunday nights with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, an update of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which aired in 1980 to mesmerized viewing.
Standing on the barren landscape of what was once Uruk in ancient Sumer, now known as Iraq, in The Immortals (Episode 11 of the modernized series), Tyson tells us about Enheduanna, an Akkadian Princess (2285-2250 BCE) about whom I had never heard until The Immortals aired on May 18, 2014.
Lovers loving. Dancers dancing. Fountains rising and falling. At the ballet.
I hardly know where to begin deconstructing some of the lunacy in the attached article about why girls are doing…
I did not grow up with money, but I was a smart kid and got scholarships to attend top notch schools with other kids who did grow up with a lot of money. During my high school and college years… Read the full article
NOTE: Dear Men: was originally published on my Google+ blog, and I have chosen to import it here because of its relevance to the #MeToo movement. I’ve been blogging on G+ since the second week of its existence, and from the… Read the full article
Perhaps that’s why we see so much vitriol online, so many anonymous, bitter comments, so many imprudent tweets and…
‘Twould appear this Sunday morning that March is wrestling with whether to remain a Lion, or to become a Lamb.
This ice dance between Meryl Davis and Charlie White is sublime.
Forgive my appearance, my Lady.
© 2025 Giselle Minoli
