A colorful journey into art, imagination, and finding your own voice.
When Stevie is drawn into a Van Gogh painting, Vincent helps her discover her passion for color.
Perfect for young artists, museum lovers, and dreamers of all ages.
Jack Ramey, poet and spoken word artist, brings to life the poems of Keats & Shelley and the revolutionary times in which they lived, with parallels to his own life in the late ‘60s at Kent State. Rome was of special importance to these two poets. Shelley wrote some of his greatest works in Rome, Keats died there, and they both are buried there in the Protestant Cemetery. This film shows how they live on as bright stars in the poetic firmament, as beacons for humanity, for truth, and for beauty.
I have always been fascinated by the Romantic poets and the rock star status of poets during their time period. They didn’t need a guitar; they used the power of words.
Shelley’s hatred of tyranny and his love of freedom and Keats’ search for truth and beauty still resonate deeply in these troubled times. We need the words of these poets now more than ever.
Our film was screened at the Utopia Film Festival in Greenbelt MD, an Award Winner at the Rome International Movie Awards, a Semi-Finalist in the Stockholm City Film Festival, a Nominee for the Falcon International Film Festival, and accepted at the Roma Cinema Doc festival, and is now available on YouTube.
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If you are, like me, a fan of historical fiction, and are intrigued by the period of Rome’s inevitable slide into the hegemony of barbarian kingdoms, then you ought to have a look at Michael Curtis Ford’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
It’s a great read with fully realized historical characters like Orestes, a Germanic Roman General and father of the last emperor Romulus Augustus and the protagonist, Odoacer, half Hun, half Scyri, who fought his way to the top of Rome’s funeral pyre. The battle scenes are magnificent, rivaling perhaps (but certainly not outdoing) the great shield-wall battles of Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord and Saxon novels.
Ford did quite a bit of research to make this novel come alive. In a Historical Note he tells his readers that perhaps no period of Rome’s history is so sparsely recorded as the 5th century CE. He relied heavily on Gibbon’s classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Fall of Rome: A Novel of a World Lost
by Michael Curtis Ford
If you have not time enough in your life to tackle this beast of a book with its long digressions into the history of whaling and the minutiae of the sperm whale, then you might consider Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, the marvelous retelling of the incident that inspired the writing of Melville’s tome.
In the year 1819, the Essex, a whaling ship out of Nantucket, at that time the largest whaling port in the world, was rammed and sunk by a huge enraged sperm whale. This is the horrifying tale of how the captain and a few of the crew somehow managed to survive in lifeboats for three months until they were rescued by another whaling vessel in the Pacific. It was a famous story in the early and mid-nineteenth century that inspired Melville to spin his own tale of a whale who waged war against his oppressors. The liner notes call Philbrick’s book “a timeless account of the human spirit under extreme duress, but it is also a story about a community, and about the kind of men and women who lived in a forbidding, remote island like Nantucket—a pioneer story that explores how we became who we are, and our peculiar blend of spiritualism and violence.”
This is a wonder of a book that brings to life the realities of life at sea on a whaling ship in the early days of America. Not only that, it reminds us of how fragile existence is and how easily and quickly our lives can be placed at the mercy of the cruel forces of nature.
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Where does sand come from? Mountains. Grains of sand broken down from mountain rock and melting ice travel down streams and rivers to end up on beaches and on the ocean floor. Delestrac’s film points out that it takes “thousands even millions of years for a grain of sand to reach the sea.” That was the way it used to work, for eons. But not any more. Rivers all over the world have been dammed up to where, in China, no sand reaches the shore. In the USA, one dam a day has been built since 1776. Sand used to lay on the surface back in the day—the old sand and gravel pit. But these have all been dug up and used. Not only construction, but the tourist industries in Miami and all over the world, require beaches for its well-fed vacationing citizens to loll about on. So thousands of million-dollar dredging ships suck up the sand from its thin layer (along with all living creatures) on the ocean floor and pump it onto the disappearing beaches along the world’s shorelines. But that pumped in sand will disappear within a year.
All this furtive, destructive, and useless activity has led to global black markets in illegal sand digging and dredging. In Mumbai they talk of the “sand mafia” that controls the legal and illegal procurement of sand, the use of it in poured-concrete construction, and the laws and zoning regulations that are supposed to control it.
Islands like the Maldives in the Indian Ocean are disappearing at an alarming rate due to the dredging up of sand from the ocean floor. Dubai’s ridiculous man-made-sand islands in the shape of a gigantic palm tree and a map of the world now lay barren and unused after wasting billions of tons of the planet’s sand. China has swallowed up one quarter of the world’s sand to build apartment blocks that sit empty. Sand does not renew itself. Once it is gone, it is gone. And, as the film dramatically points out, if this disastrous trend continues (as is likely) it will soon be gone forever.
If you want to learn about this little known catastrophe in the making so that you can add your voice to an outraged hue and cry and be part of the solution, not part of the problem, watch Sand Wars and tell your friends and neighbors to watch it as well.
Sand Wars
by Award-Winning Director Denis Delestrac
Related Poem: Shan-Shui: Rivers-and-Mountains
[Poem]
Pigs bloated with conceit
Like pink hot air balloons
Sprout white wings and
Fly high all over Washington D.C.
In the Capital, in the Oval
Office, even in Lincoln’s bedroom.
Swine line up at the hubris trough
On the top floor of the golden tower
Snorting and rooting and waiting
To get some. Get some piece of the pork-
Barrel-pie before they fly away home.
When swine fly in Air Force One
You and your family had better run
For those proverbial hills, or underground,
Before it’s too late to run.
Don’t forget to take your gun – you have
One, don’t you? To shoot all those zombie drones
Who lurk in the wake of winged flying piggies
With little bombs strapped to their hooves
Just in case some dirty liberal immigrant thieves
Lurch into their alt-right flight paths
Like Canada Geese into airplane engines.
They are gonna get some, those swine, and
Their zombie minions who follow them
Like carrion crows followed the Roman legions.
Swine and zombies love the taste of human flesh
And now with wings can dive-bomb on anyone
Who gets in their way to eat clean down
To the bone like murder victims in the Old West
Thrown into the pig pen to get rid of the evidence.
Tombstone and Deadwood days are back again:
The twin fasces on Capitol Hill with their axes
And rods take on a new hue—begin to glow now
And soon will sprout their own wings to fly
With their new leaders, flying beside the patrician
Swine, protecting them from all future assault.
SPQR – The Senate and People of Rome on man-
Hole covers all over Rome put there by Mussolini:
Another swine who flew too high like der Führer
Flying above the Bavarian Alps: Deutschland First
His battle cry until, finally, in nineteen forty-five
Hiding beneath Berlin in his underground bunker
Blind like a mole without wings, all the fascist
Flying swine brought back down to earth to hang
Upside-down like Mussolini in the Eternal City of death.
[/Poem]
Featured Photograph: President Donald Trump boarding Air Force One in West Palm Beach
……by Stephen Crowley @Stcrow, 6 February 2017
“Washington is all artifice and show business — even more so today than when I started,” Mr. Crowley said. “There is a lot to be upset about these days, and there are a lot of people to hold accountable in media and politics.” The Idiosyncratic Eye of Stephen Crowley
Related Article: How Republics End
……by Paul Krugman
“It takes willful blindness not to see the parallels between the rise of fascism and our current political nightmare. . . . One thing all of this makes clear is that the sickness of American politics didn’t begin with Donald Trump, any more than the sickness of the Roman Republic began with Caesar. The erosion of democratic foundations has been underway for decades, and there’s no guarantee that we will ever be able to recover. But if there is any hope of redemption, it will have to begin with a clear recognition of how bad things are. American democracy is very much on the edge.”
