notanotherbookreview

  THIS VIEW HAS NEVER LOOKED THE SAME.   This day has never come before. Forget apocalyptic thinking.   ENJOY YOUR HOLIDAY, Your New Year's mystery. 2022 has yet to take shape in our glorious world. *** A friend read this card and sent me this link to CANCELL THE APOCALYPSE 30 FILMS, alternative versions of how we might actually save the planet and ourselves. https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/cancel-the-apocalypse-documentaries-to-help-unlock-the-good-ending/ **** With COVID I am no longer buying into the idea of some inevitable apocalypse. Years ago, I wrote Paradise Gardens , a corporate dystopia, where the "business estates" take over government and mankind's destiny. It is a dark cautionary tale. But humans are not the only force on this earth, About every hundred years, nature culls our herd with some plague. Earth is cleansed of human dominance, a cyclical happenstance like much of nature. Take the origins of human illness with this virus. I be...

  Peter Cherches, TRACKS: Memoirs From a Life With Music , published by Bamboo Dart Press. I enjoy Peter's prose, from his early Condensed Book t o the more recent Whistler's Mother's Son and Other Curiosities  (Pelekinesis). Publishers Weekly called him "one of the innovators of the short short story" before the term flash fiction. I also enjoyed his amusing and suprising performances at Cornelia Street Cafe with Lee Feldman, crooning standards of his own. Below is an excerpt from TRACKS . Miles Davis, “Straight, No Chaser,” from Milestones (1958)  One of the first jazz albums I bought as an adolescent, I think when I was 12, was Milestones, by the Miles Davis Sextet. I figured I’d kill two jazz birds with one stone: Miles Davis and John Coltrane, neither of whom I’d ever heard, to my knowledge. I was unaware at the time of the more legendary status of the group’s next album, Kind of Blue. I did know that Miles Davis was possibly the most famous living jazz mus...

Autonomy becomes urgent necessity in a volume of interlocking stories and a novel, Heroines must shed socio political expectations  and  their conditioning to remake their worlds.  GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER  (Grove Atlantic) by Bernardine Evaristo, won the 2019 Booker Prize and I am glad I just got around to reading it.  In our emergence from Covid, it seems more relevant than it might have in 2019.  These intertwined stories are like a musical ronde, each a different aspect of the subject, Black women finding autonomy, despite daily lives that demand conformity. Their voices, unexpected and enjoyable, come from present day Britain, though they extend to intergenerational immigrant experiences in Guam, the Caribbean, Nigeria.  Mothers, daughters, wives, fled wars and poverty, only to face new struggle and danger in public housing and menial jobs, no matter what education they brought. Their children, second generation, are caught in ambitions "to make it" and...

What is a Chapbook? I always thought of it as poetry, printed on vellum with letterpress and largely undistributed beyond poetry community. According to Wikipedia:   " A chapbook is a small publication of up to about 40 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch. In early modern Europe a chapbook was a type of printed street literature." These prose chapbooks by BAMBOO DART PRESS may be a 2021 version of "street literature".  Attractive to hold in your hand, around 45 pages, they offer a meaningful, even inspiring read. But can these books be long enough to deliver that experience?  In these disconnected days of isolation, I enjoyed the humor and wonder in these books.    Books and Tapes and Art and a series of chapbooks, a collaboration between Pelekinesis and Shrimper Records and Tapes.     John Brantingham  is a poet, novelist, essayist and foremost in this book, a man who remembers being a kid and profound moments, like peeling an orang...

I am a lover of landscapes. I have painted them in oils, watercolors, pastels, colored pencils, ink, even collage and the results vary with mood and the weather--often the same.  I have spent many hours in the same place at the same time. Losing myself in a scene is essential, whether finished from a photo later or not. I've been told that losing awareness of time and self, while completely focused on an external scene is outward meditation. Whatever you call it. Landscape artists often exchange knowing looks about how good it feels to paint nature, especially outside. When a friend told me she had a photograph in Las Laguna Gallery's landscape show, I was curious about the work. Here were landscapes, seascapes, dreamscapes in paint, acrylic, wax, pastel, gauche, prints, pottery, photographs, (digital prints, silverpoint and images mixed with paint.). Whether literal or abstract, engineered or imagined ,work seemed to glory less in human perception than the unknowable mystery ...

INTERIOR CHINATOWN Charles Yu's amazing novel, enacts the life of bit part actor, Willis Wu ,and his (and his family's experiences) within the context of "Black and White," a TV crime show. In this show, as in  the world outside "The Golden Palace" (home and workplace of generations of Chinese immigrants) the "yellow" of Asian Americans is always a stereotypical character, exotic background color, a plot device; never just a regular American of Asian descent. Yet in Willis' world, people are constantly striving for their American dream. Children all get  4.0 and above. Yet no matter how they succeed in school and for how long (generations) they are still treated as outsiders. Many end up back where they grew up, at a "The Golden Palace" restaurant job.  With great humor, INTERIOR CHINATOWN creates Wu's layered reality.  His family also played the bit parts, his dad even hit the top role, Kung Fu Master. Behind that inscrutable Chi...