“Natural History Psychedelia”: Alexis Rockman’s “Great Lakes Cycle”
These works are about as subtle as a trainwreck, but they are surprisingly fun, despite their depressingly urgent call to take environmental responsibility.
After a trial-by-fire year as public school substitute teacher and fly-by-night freelancer, Julia will shed the tribulations of the work-world to embark on a MA in art history and museum studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. If you are in town, she’ll gladly take you to a local museum. She enjoys walks, leopard print, and good conversation.
by Julia LaPlaca | Apr 23, 2018
These works are about as subtle as a trainwreck, but they are surprisingly fun, despite their depressingly urgent call to take environmental responsibility.
by Julia LaPlaca | Mar 23, 2018
What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation.
by Julia LaPlaca | Feb 23, 2018
On Sunday, I came across a body, lying by the side of the road—an expanding pool of blood seeping from the head.
by Julia LaPlaca | Jan 23, 2018
In some respects, Lincoln in the Bardo doesn’t really feel like a novel at all (despite the insistent subtitle), but is rather a carefully curated collection of voices that reside in some literary bardo between genres.
by Julia LaPlaca | Dec 23, 2017
Why this part of the story? Why is this heavenly exchange, from a narrative full of divine meetings, such a favorite in western Christian art?
by Julia LaPlaca | Nov 23, 2017
But to return to reality, the sweet normality of home becomes sweetest after absence. The familiar is defined by exposure to the foreign and new.
by Julia LaPlaca | Oct 23, 2017
For a blog written by people between the ages of twenty-three and thirty circa 2017, it’s been a while since we’ve talked about podcasts.
by Julia LaPlaca | Sep 23, 2017
Time isn’t food, money, a place, or a feeling, or an object or a person—it just is. Despite a wealth of idioms, it’s still hard to talk about time and harder still to savor it.
by Julia LaPlaca | Aug 23, 2017
I always tried to do the independent thing first—I’ll call my own tow-truck, I’ll look for my own apartment, I’ll find a job, I’ll pick a grad program.
by Julia LaPlaca | Jul 23, 2017
It was glorious. We started slow, but accelerated into more and more swings and twirls. The best dances are the ones with strange guys who happened to be very good dancers.
by Julia LaPlaca | Jun 23, 2017
By mid morning, the classroom was really heating up. I turned on every available fan, shut off the the overhead lights, and opened the windows.
by Julia LaPlaca | May 23, 2017
In opera we spend time on what matters in life: the big emotional peaks and abysses.
by Julia LaPlaca | Apr 23, 2017
Like many a literary grouch before him, Ove’s icy winter of life thaws before his final curtain.
by Julia LaPlaca | Feb 23, 2017
Nowhere else in this big wide world of ours can you find a life-size Michael Jackson and Princess Diana made entirely out of marzipan.
by Julia LaPlaca | Jan 23, 2017
Silence is dead serious about faith.
by Julia LaPlaca | Dec 23, 2016
I never identified with Scrooge until this Christmas. It’s so easy to be Scrooge.
by Julia LaPlaca | Nov 23, 2016
Never enter unknown territory without good instructions from the absent officer. Otherwise you will stumble into a jungle of twenty-four small people’s very specific needs and probably make severe tactical errors.
by Julia LaPlaca | Oct 23, 2016
The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
by Julia LaPlaca | Sep 23, 2016
All human societies make heroes. Christians enjoy a cloud of witnesses to choose from—some ancient and some who bear the complexities of our own times.
by Julia LaPlaca | Aug 23, 2016
But, as a single woman with no romantic prospects on the current horizon, I’ve gained the most intimacy with two men I have never met.
by Julia LaPlaca | Jul 30, 2016
The village of Visnes boasts an unusual claim to fame—its now-defunct mine produced the copper used on the Statue of Liberty.