Corposant- - the ball of fire which is sometimes seen playing around the masts of ships in a storm, from Italian corpo santo-- holy body. St...

Here, some fantastical illustrations from The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man by Dr. Alesha Sivartha. Sivartha...

The other day I went to see the Iraq war documentary-- No End in Sight : Devastating, galling, embarrassing. It provoked teeth gritting, mut...

It's August and I can't think of anything compelling to say at the moment. I've mulled over and discarded several possible post ...

Another in an occasional series that casts a spotlight on a few of the best blogs I frequent . Here, the art of memory by one, Matthew Swie...

"We're trying to run a city, not a goddam democracy!" This weekend I saw "The Taking of Pelham 123," the classic hei...

Tintypes, also know as ferrotypes, were the snapshots of their day . With an amazingly long run in popularity, they were inexpensive, widely...

A small selection of Dutch and early Flemish portraits . Early on these sitters were often donors painted into the religious scenes they fi...

I don't typically use this space to disparage other people's personal essays (though there was that post about the peach and the ol...

I've been thinking about "disgust." Largely thats because it's something I feel rather frequently, especially in New York-...

Once one gets over the initial shock of Iceland: that is--the outlandish cost of food ($15 for a bagel sandwich, $3+ for what was essentiall...

Top three images are of an ice cave we (my friend Rolf, making an appearance as a scale figure, is in the photos) explored. Technically it...

images: 1-4 & 6: Reykjavik. I was charmed by the corrugated metal houses!; 5: rocks on Vik beach with me reflected in each one; 7 & ...