Amiri Baraka: “Politics is to protect truth and beauty”

Amiri Baraka

“Politics is to protect truth and beauty.” Amiri Baraka, famed leader of the Black Arts Movement, was a poet, playwright, jazz critic, and actor. He was also a notorious political revolutionary who did not cease protesting despite arrests and beatings by the Newark police and struggling to install an honest government that would respond to…

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Enjoy the latest issue of INTERFACES

interfaces

Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image. This issue focuses on images and memories, with fascinating discussions ranging from fiction that uses photographs with its text, to Ken Burns’ recontextualizing photojournalism in his Vietnam War documentary and, as an added treat, my on-camera interview with Jules Feiffer, the brilliant…

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Susan Minot Paints Everything, Everywhere

Susan Minot

“I like to say ‘I write,’ or ‘I paint,’ and not ‘I am an anything.” The award-winning writer of novels, short stories, screenplays, and poems, Susan Minot says she grew up in a family in which everyone always had something before them to do with their hands. It is a habit that has stayed with…

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti is turning 100!

Happy 100th Birthday Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Legendary poet, artist, publisher and social activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti will celebrate his 100th birthday on March 24. My on-camera interview with him in 2001 has been edited into a four minute homage by Michelle Memran, producer and director of last year’s critically lauded film “The Rest I Make Up.” After producing no fewer than 30…

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Charlie Brown and Spider-Man inspired Clifford Thompson

Charlie Brown, Marvel, and Clifford Thompson: Inspired by Comics

Writer-Artist 14: Clifford Thompson “Being at odds with the world around you is a common theme among personal essayists, and my first model of an artistic treatment of such themes was Peanuts.” Writing and Art Were a Single Pursuit Even as a child of seven or eight, Thompson says his attempts at writing and art…

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An Interview with Jules Feiffer

Jules Feiffer

“My goal was to overthrow the government…” – Jules Feiffer What a treat it was to chat with Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award-winning cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, author of more than 35 books, illustrator, and for decades the most widely read satirist in America. Enjoy this candid interview in which he explains how…

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“Eating with my Eyes”: The Landscapes of Guy de Maupassant

Eating with my Eyes: The Sketches of Guy de Maupassant

Writer-Artist 13: Guy de Maupassant “I have the clear and profound feeling of eating with my eyes, and digesting colors as you would digest meat and fruit.” Achieved Greatness and Wished for More France’s greatest short story writer—his first collection of short stories was in its twelfth printing in less than two years, and his…

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Poly-poly-math: Lera Auerbach is a Quadruple Threat

Poly-poly-math: Lera Auerbach is a Quadruple Threat

Writer-Artist 12: Lera Auerbach “Borderless creativity” A Living Renaissance Woman Lera Auerbach has resisted creative pigeonholing from her earliest years. Playing the piano and composing at four, she was told she must choose, that it was not possible to become both a virtuoso performer and serious composer. When, at 12, she informed her piano instructor that…

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Dylan Paints America

bob dylan paints america

Writer-Artist 11: Bob Dylan “The idea was to create pictures that would not be misinterpreted.” A 20th century icon, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, 12 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and a special Pulitzer Prize, Bob Dylan has been making art since recovering from a motorcycle accident in the 60’s, has published…

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Prolific Poet William Jay Smith Somehow Found Time to Paint

Prolific Poet William Jay Smith Remarkably Found Time to Paint

Writer-Artist 10: William Jay Smith 97 years old when he died, William Jay Smith apparently wasted not a minute of them. U.S. Poet Laureate Achieving national publication of a poem at 14, it was probably unsurprising that Smith would end up Poet Laureate of the United States, a member of the American Academy of Arts…

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