Driving Into Beverly Hills
I am driving in heavy traffic to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. It takes all my concentration to navigate the 405. This freeway is always clogged with crazy L.A. drivers. A lot of them think their destination is more important than anyone else’s. Talk about entitlement in action! My appointment is at 9:45 a.m., and it’s already 9:10 a.m. I feel like I’m in a capsule, creeping along a slow-moving conveyer belt. My mouth is so dry, I have to gulp down some water. I re-grip the steering wheel and notice that my palms are damp. My palms are never sweaty! I order myself to take a deep breath....
Read MoreI Wander Into a Memory
When I was little, I did not wander as a cloud. I floated on one. I have to admit, when the assignment was given to us to write about a poem, I did not think I would find one that would capture my interest or my memory. For days, my ears would burn the table of contents as my fingers struck down page numbers in a hopeless search to find something that I could connect with, for something that I could write about and have it be genuine. I was lost, and my hopes for finding a poem that would even hold my interest long enough to allow me to write about it seemed to impossible. I was a...
Read MoreMy Morning with a Tree
A day off from walking, I rise to greet the day and the palo brea tree in the front yard. Do you know this tree? Smooth green bark like a palo verde tree, but instead of needles there are soft little leaves, and when it blooms the yellow flowers run all along the branches. Lovely, and thorns aplenty. This tree is not yet the lawn-spanning shade canopy I envision it will become in its future, but it’s getting there. It has a big spirit, gently pressing its boundaries and expanding its comfort zone a little more each day. Eager and responsive, it grows a jumble of limbs going this way and...
Read MoreThe Strange Peasant, Invisible Authors, and Spiritual Music
Eusapia Palladino during a seance A chapter from The Mystics The history of the occult contains a considerable gallery of materializations by mediums, and among the most discussed in all records of spiritualism was Eusapia Palladino, who was born January 21, 1854. The event occurred in the Italian town of Bari on the Adriatic, and her actual name was Minerverno Murgeo. As an infant, her mother died, and little more than ten years later her father was slain by bandits. Soon afterwards she was across the peninsula, on the opposite coast, in Naples. It is said that she displayed one of her...
Read MoreMy Calderon Years, Part 2
[In part one, Dean Borok found employment at Calderon Bags and Belts as an assistant designer, over the heated objections of the company sales manager. In this installment, he retells his experience putting together an unusual fashion show. This installment previously appeared on Hackwriters.com.] I became an expert leather cutter, which is a very desirable thing to know. I developed into as good a cutter as the workers who had been working for the company for 20 years. I learned to operate the splitter, which reduces the thickness of the leather, and the paring machine for thinning the...
Read MoreKino Otok – Isola Cinema Festival
Isola Will Slovenian Cinematography Survive? To understand the film industry of a country, it requires defining certain concepts of nation and statehood, and placing them in a context which is historical, political, and geographical. It also requires knowledge of history and cinema history in much wider sense. For the last ten years, film critics from Slovenia have announced a genuine crises their small domestic filmmaking industry. For years, there have been rumors about the bad quality of Slovenian film, about the fading of Slovenian cinematography. Nevertheless, this small former...
Read More