Lady Lava, from the Shawn Barry music video, "All In This Together" (dir. Sam Balcomb).
Stay tuned for the release of a NEW issue, coming in the week of April 16.

PHOTOGRAPHY
In February 2005, Canadian photo-artist Edward Burtynsky accepted the inaugural TED Prize — three wishes to change the world. He was granted $100,000 and the opportunity to team with several major companies pledging to help the recipients fulfill the wishes.

Luther Gerlach could be considered a true plein air photographer: he shoots with vintage lenses and large-format cameras and creates glass-plate negatives with the wet-collodion process on location.

For this grand celebratory issue of TheScreamOnline, Photography Editor Joanne Warfield honors three prominent photographers from past issues by having them revisit the magazine with their latest works. They are all giants in their fields and artists whose work is always a revelation to see.

Multi-dimensional Sean Kernan brings forth images that allow us to see into greater depths of the human spirit.

Former chief U.N. photographer John Isaac has made six trips to Kashmir for a new book. He offers TheScreamOnline a sneak preview of his stunning work. UPDATE: This feature of John’s Kashmir photos is linked in the Salman Rushdie interview at Fareed Zakaria's Foreign Exchange.

Former William Mortensen student Robert Balcomb offers three exquisite pieces from his “After” series and seven still lifes. By the way, he also has a blog on photography. Stop on by and say hello.

Every January we look forward to the prestigious photo l.a.—the popular West Coast event for fine photography, featuring the collections of galleries and private dealers from around the world and produced by the Stephen Cohen Gallery. This year the opening night reception was hosted by Graham Nash.

PhotoRescue saved an entire trip's worth of photos of Dubai when a friend's memory flash card went bad, restoring all the images that he thought were gone forever.

More entries from our popular Photo Gallery.


ART
Metaphysical painter Robin Larsen enchants us with the mysteries of the ages as she weaves mythology and the making of gold into her wondrous series, Alchemical Angels. With accompanying poetry by husband Stephen Larsen.

Since the mid-1990s Seattle-based designer Tim Girvin has been keeping journals of his thoughts, sketches, poetry, and observations. We feature two journals which beautifully exemplify the multi-talents of this philosopher, artist, designer, and calligrapher.

Reshuffle is a project wherein forty-seven cultural producers consider the possibilities of a mobile, reactive museum. This exhibition-as-publication was organized by first-year students in the master’s degree program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York.

Ahmed Faheem’s impressive installation The Dream in Cairo, Egypt.

One week following photo l.a. (see above) was the equally prestigious art l.a—the popular West Coast event for fine art, produced by artfairs, inc.

“The best artists are keen observers of nature. But more than this, they are superb communicators.” Norm Nason offers one of the most valuable lessons “On Drawing” we’ve ever seen.


FILM
Filmmakers Sam Balcomb and Jesse Soff teamed up to create The Ore, a million-dollar-looking Sci-Fi film shot for only a few thousand clams.

  We’re proud to continue to feature What Dreams May Come and Somewhere in Time producer Stephen Simon’s wildly-popular new movement called Spiritual Cinema Circle, which promotes uplifting films with positive messages, delving into such topics as life after life, enhanced powers and sensibilities, reality and time, visionary romance and adventures, and the power of love. The first month’s DVD is free! Check it out.


MUSIC
Canadian violin virtuoso Lara St. John is also a writer, having chronicled many of her experiences traveling the world as a Classical musician. Read “Just another day in the life of a touring violinist — Not!”

Yoga Master Peter Sterios has a revolutionary new DVD, Gravity & Grace, with three hours of music scored by Stuart Balcomb. A double CD of the music is due out soon.

We found an uncredited newspaper article describing the events that inspired folk singer Arlo Guthrie's 18-minute song “The Alice's Restaurant Massacree” which later became the movie “Alice's Restaurant.”


FICTION
Lisa Lenard-Cook’s most recent novel, Coyote Morning, explores how a few people in a New Mexico town cope with the area’s insistent wildness — and with their own lives. The book was selected as a 2004 Southwest Book of the Year by the Tucson-Pima County Public Library. We present Chapter One here.

Living in Srebrenica amid the turmoil of the Bosnian civil war, one brother struggles to keep his family alive. Half a world away, the other makes a life for himself as a medical resident in Berkeley, California. Their letters explore the extremes and jarring contrasts of contemporary life in Christine Calson’s somber, exquisitely crafted story, “Between the Lines.”

Death is no respecter of persons, and makes no allowances for favorite relatives, who may suffer as horribly as anyone. But in the end what still matters is what always mattered: courage, kindness, memory, and the love of a good joke: so Ted discovers in Jay Prefontaine's grimly touching story, “I’m Dead.”


NONFICTION
Teaching in a prison, you learn to listen to the walls. At first you can’t wait to get out, but then you discover that the place — and still more, the people — have a hold on you that will last forever. Lyn Halper tells how it happens in her beautifully crafted memoir, “The Walls Sing.”

Robert Grudin lines up the likes of Giovanni Boccacchio, Vittorio da Feltre, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Frederick Douglass to discuss “The Education of the Vulgar,” from his manuscript The American Vulgar.

As if homo sapiens weren't already ridiculous enough, with his hairless body, upright posture, and swollen cranium, the species had to go and evolve a capacity for romantic love. But, in fact, it is this crowning eccentricity that makes the rest of the package viable, or so John Kilgore argues, in “Love and Biology.”


POETRY
Jared Carter is one of the great American poets. You feel it in the strength of his beliefs about our country and its people, our world and its beauty and its problems; and you feel it in the care with which he writes and in the music of his long and lyrical lines. He writes like a person whose eyes and heart and mind are always open.

September 11, 2001, changed the world for all of us, and 16 poets from the United States and Europe address one of the most profound changes: our sense of God in this post 9/11 world.

In “A Riff on the Color Blue,” Editor-in-Chief Stuart Vail reviews The Blue Museum, the latest book of poetry by Phil Cousineau.


EPIPHANIES
In “The Presence of Myth” Phil Cousineau shows his script-writing class the “riot of emotion” that director John Huston so devastatingly portrayed in his adaptation of James Joyces’ short story “The Dead.”

Synchronicity has been a common theme in our Epiphanies section. The editor lists some instances that have happened to him, and invites you to submit stories of your own.


COMMENTARY
“The Terrible Beauty of Pope John Paul II: Why Even Those Who Disagreed with Him Cheat Themselves and Their Causes if They Miss the Chance to Learn From His Life, and His Death,” by Danusha V. Goska.

Ron Roizen’s Omphalos looks at the “apparent disagreement between the enormous age of the earth suggested by the geological record and the comparatively much shorter six-thousand-year age suggested by the book of Genesis.”

Sheron Mariah Steele was wounded in the Middle East, and as her shattered knee was healing she wrote a most poignant Easter greeting to a friend, titled “Survival 101.”

Unhealthy Vegetable Oils? Does the food industry ignore science regarding polyunsaturated oils? —by CJ Puotinen.

“In the past eight years, eight young foreign students have passed through our house, all of them wanting to improve their English. By the end of the year they certainly spoke faster; and their vocabularies certainly expanded. But in other ways some of them made long strides backward.” So, I’m like, who cares? by Rob Woutat.


QUOTATIONS
Bon mots, witticisms, stupidity, and just plain nastiness.

BOOKS
Want some suggestions for good reading? Check out TheScreamOnline Bookshelf. Buying books through these links can help keep us afloat.

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