My friend Kena Herod got me reminiscing about all of the African American dancers I admire with her recent post…
Sunday morning musings…
When I was 15 Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust had such an impact on me I imagined that were I to venture a trip to Los Angeles, Tod Hackett, Faye Greener and their entire entourage of misfit friends would greet me at the train station. My childhood in Northern New Mexico was one from which I was desperate to escape, where Cowboys and Indians were real, not the stuff of Hollywood movies we would watch at a drive-in theatre with the help of a speaker attached to a rolled down car window. While I knew that the American Southwest fostered a kind of mythic appeal for the endless stream of Easterners arriving to set down roots under its majestic skies, I had grown up under that star-strewn ether and longed for something else, something far less real than the rodeos I attended on weekends, and West’s words had convinced me I would find that reality in the City of Angels.
Greetings Googlers
The days are getting longer and I am suddenly thinking about her again, harbinger of Spring and Summer that her species is. I killed her last October. Not intentionally, but in the end it hardly mattered the deed was done…. Read the full article
0 degrees and another glorious sunrise, which began with deep orange-red, turned redder, faded to rose-pink, then pale yellow and lifted soon enough to a white light. Your sun, wherever you are, has been or will be the same, but… Read the full article
Morning
Alone (almost) on McClures Beach, Pt. Reyes National Seashore…
Good morning from Pt. Reyes
The first time I heard Tracy Chapman sing Baby Can I Hold You Tonight I cried.
Mornin’ (again)
Grumpy the Gargoyle sends Christmas Greetings to Googlers everywhere, from his home in the Shenandoah Valley…
If you want someone to accompany you on your journey through life
Do Less and Let the Music Shine
Greetings, Googlers
Good Sunday morning, post-Sandy…and pre-the Rest of Our Lives
I feel like such a fool.
Evenin’
Hello, everyone
While certain life experiences are more or less universal – falling in or out of love, winning or losing a job, saying goodbye to one’s parents at the end of their lives – there are times when our individual realities… Read the full article
It’s Sunday, and I’m inspired by the work of other artists. And today it’s the witty, sweet and whacky William Wegman, who has made an entire career out of taking pictures of his dogs. It all started with one named… Read the full article
Is it just me or is the push to find a “drug cure,” as opposed to focusing on protecting our health on a day-to-day basis, off the mark? My mother died from complications of Alzheimer’s. This is the lingo…my… Read the full article
Good morning…with a short video for my Google+ friends
Good morning, lovers…
Good Sunday afternoon my fellow stepmothers and stepfathers (and everyone else!)
My conscious awareness of the meaning of the word “stepparent” didn’t begin until I married a man with three adult children. For someone is not a stepparent unless they are legally married to a person who has offspring from a… Read the full article
Sitting here with a morning quadruple shot caffe latte reading the New York Times (some of us still do that) and came across this charming story about artist Shantell Martin, who lives in Brooklyn with generous friends who allow her… Read the full article
If you are anywhere near Philadelphia… Get Thee to the Barnes Foundation, to see the rather incredible collection amassed by Albert C. Barnes and always housed, until now, in the original mansion he built for his works of art by… Read the full article
Will my hands look like hers when I am old? The nails dry and ridged, the joints heavy with arthritis, the veins sitting slightly atop the bones, the fingers slender and delicate, the skin thin and pearly and freckled with age spots, but the grip of a woman who worked with her hands all her life still strong and engaging and defiant.
Might you be feeling a little paranoid today, like the Light-Footed Clapper Rail? Maybe you have said something you wish you hadn’t, like the Mandrill? Or are you confused about which direction is really up, as is the Caribbean Flamingo?… Read the full article
I’ve been traveling a lot and working. I haven’t been in touch as much as I want to be, and I have missed people’s posts that are important. But so many of you have been kind and stayed in touch… Read the full article
I saw the fantastic Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art this week, which is a stunning collection of her fearless self-portraits. Repeatedly turning the camera on herself – tenderly, unforgivingly, coldly, dispassionately and often humorously – Sherman… Read the full article
On March 16th I wrote the below Morning Ode to Death of a Salesman after reading about Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman, one of the great roles in American theatre, in the current Broadway revival. I saw the play… Read the full article
Hello, everyone
Good morning, everyone
Good morning, everyone…scientists, techies, artists…dancers…
Forgetfulness: The name of the author is the first to go, followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel, which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of. It is as if,… Read the full article
Good morning, everyone
Friend? Family? Should we start a new Circle?” I asked. I put you in family, G. You’re an Altman,” she answered. I laughed when I read my stepdaughter’s sweet and swift response to how I should list her among my… Read the full article
The theatre has the power to change a person’s experience of life within the brief timespan of a few hours. You enter not knowing what to expect, and emerge with all your senses on fire, your intellect and emotions enhanced,… Read the full article
Evening all you step parents and step families…
Arriving, I remember everything exactly as it was – the sights, sounds and smells of a place I have often visited in my memory these past 37 years. White Calla Lilies tucked among the wild grasses alongside Stinson Beach in winter, hawks kiting into the wind, wings outstretched, suspended above the surf. Fog, guardian of seaside mysteries, shroud for molting Eucalyptus, billowing a warning to stay off the winding mountain road, yet beckoning one onward. Sunglasses lightly misting over with sea spray, ears cooled by the coastal wind, dry lips salted and licked. Sea foam and kelp bulbs, children giggling and dogs digging, and cold wet sand rising up through painted red toes.
Stop what you’re doing, for just 3:23 minutes, and watch The Inner Net, a video of poet performance artist David Bowden making an impassioned case for paying attention and connection, yes, in part by reaching out to one another through… Read the full article
I Remember Better When I Paint is an inspiring documentary about reaching out to men and women living with Alzheimer’s through the art and craft of painting, drawing and museum visits. My mother died of Alzheimer’s in 2004. One of… Read the full article
My fault entirely for making the task so difficult. How foolish to have created so many enticing views from which I was forced to disengage. How indulgent to have installed a window over my husband’s Jacuzzi, in which he bathed and read in the early morning hours while I slept, and from which it was possible to see all the way to the south gap in the Massanutten Ridge.
How absurd to have six windows rounding the north and east corners of our bedroom, all the better from which to watch a raccoon, for instance, make its way along the entire length of Farmer Marsden’s apple orchard before disappearing into the pasture on the other side of the vegetable garden.
I had no one to blame but myself for making it so painful to say goodbye to the small house my husband and I had built in the Virginia countryside, and the vivid mental picture I’d painted of the long life I thought we would spend in that beautiful light-filled space.
I wanted to share Grace Glueck’s tribute to the life and art of painter Helen Frankenthaler. Glueck reviews the basic details of Frankenthaler’s life – her education in the intellectual environment of Bennington College, her marriage to painter Robert Motherwell,… Read the full article
At my home my walls and bookshelves are covered with art made almost entirely by friends, family and people I have known personally, although there are of course exceptions. I grew up surrounded by my parents’ artist friends, so “knowing”… Read the full article
People from my early professional life seem to be popping up everywhere. I’ll receive an out of the blue email from one person, while the smiling face of another emerges from a sea of faintly recognizable features somewhere on social media. Funny how these old friends seem to know that all these years later I still have a land line, their instantly recognizable voices sometimes leaving long and detailed hellos from various places around the world.
Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey had a huge impact on me in my early years in New York. I saw the revival – with Amanda Plummer – and everything about its gritty, bald, fearless depiction of life turned… Read the full article
…that I’ve always had a strong visceral reaction to, but I never gave it much thought…until this past Friday afternoon.
“In species in which males care for young, testosterone is often high during mating periods but then declines to allow for caregiving of resulting offspring.” – Department of Anthropology, Cells to Society, Center on Social Disparities and Health, Institute for… Read the full article
When I was a kid I would scour the landscape for mothers with children and watch them as though through a microscope. Mothers with packs of children followed us everywhere – to our dentist’s and doctor’s offices, to the gas… Read the full article
“We were born before the wind. Also younger than the sun…” – Van Morrison, Into the Mystic
For reasons I have never quite understood, children tend to flinch, blanch and wince at any suggestion that their parents might have had sex for the pure pleasure of it, rather than solely for the purpose of having children. It… Read the full article
I never set out to write about being a stepparent, but then I never set out to be a stepmother. To be honest, I never set out to get married or to have children, so long before not intending to… Read the full article
My mother was a collector of letters and photographs. She filled old shoeboxes with meticulously hand-written communications from my father’s Italian relatives, their fragile parchment leaves folded within envelopes bearing intriguing foreign stamps and exotic return addresses. Bunches of letters bound together with thin rubber bands, their cohesive elasticity pushed to the limit, filled the corners of her closet, were tucked under her bed, and occupied the shelves in the green-painted hutch originally intended for crockery, while oversized and heartier legal documents were crammed into manila envelopes marked Soragna Farm, Liguria Affair, or, simply, Italy. The years passed, she ran out of room, and even more letters eventually took the place of the spirits bottles in her elegant old liquor cabinet.
© 2025 Giselle Minoli
