My Mom, Glam Icon
Fashion is not about design, it’s about emotion, said couturier Alber Elbaz, and that’s certainly been true in my personal experience. My emotional relationship with fashion began at about age one, the earliest I was able to trundle around our tiny Park Slope apartment and pull open the door of my mother’s closet. It was a place of […]
Two Poems by Laurie Soriano
Laurie Soriano is unique, in my experience: a lawyer who writes poetry, the literary equivalent of a mythical unicorn. True, the best legal writing can be poetry; parts of the California Code meet that high bar, but practicing lawyers barely ever do. “I have written poetry since I was a child, and I also am a lawyer,” Soriano says in trademark […]
Bullish on Intellectual Property
Can proximity create copyright infringement? Artist Arturo Di Modica claims it can. The creator of the famous bronze “Charging Bull” that has since 1989 been a visual signifier of Wall Street is demanding that the city of New York remove an adjoining sculpture he says distorts the meaning of his work. In March, the statue dubbed “Fearless Girl” was […]
‘Wild’ at Art
(Photos by Paula Parisi) As evenings go, it was a tantalizing mix of paintings and poetry, with a some science thrown in (bonus points!) Definitely worth driving to Torrance for “Margaret Lazzrari – Wild Biology: A Mid-Career Retrospective” at the El Camino College Art Gallery. In fact, I hope to go again before the show […]
Humans: A Look Under the Hood
Over drinks at a cocktail party — mine wine, his water — a physicist I know compared his body to a Ferrari. A vintage Ferrari, I thought, raising an eyebrow as he explained how he puts only the purest of fuel in his tank. Well-conditioned human bodies are often compared to fine-tuned machines. It’s an apt metaphor. We’re carbon-based […]
Africa’s Legal Beat
Native drums have long been associated with Africa’s cultural roots, integral to the daily life and rituals of many communities. Its influence has spread worldwide, providing the launchpad for a multitude of music styles, among them jazz and rock and roll, all of which is widely recognized. Less known is the disruptive effect of colonial drumming […]
Fearless
I recently read in a recruitment post: “We want someone who is fearless.” A rather unusual job requirement, it left me intrigued as to what it suggested about the employer and potential employee. What does it mean to be fearless? In aggregate, is it a good thing? Or really not so much? At its most […]