I love New Orleans. I fell in love with the city as a little girl, just by reading stories set there. I watched in agony as Hurricane Katrina approached, prayed with friends that the city would be spared and wept when the levees broke and destroyed so many lives. I was given the opportunity to research and fact-check the city online post-Katrina, followed by two amazing, transcendent trips to NOLA in 2006 and 2007 for the Voodoo Music Fest and then Mardi Gras. I cheered when the Super Bowl was held there with U2 playing at halftime and whooped with ecstatic joy embracing a group of Orleans-loving friends when the Saints won last season. New Orleans is at once languorous and vital, seductive, dangerous, joyous, profound, sacred, nasty, naughty, glorious. She is the Holy of Holies, full of magic and mystery, charm and force; fierce and exuberant.

Donatello’s Maddelena Penitente shows us the pain of separation from the Almighty.

Los Angeles based film director and artist John Roecker created this inspirational short film. It’s an artistic overview and a love letter to Los Angeles, punk rock and the creative spirit, plus a call for everyone to manifest their dreams. Though um, in places it’s NSFW.

A look at the work of impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh.

All I want for Christmas is to watch Hollywood’s Jesus films, like the full cycle of Star Wars movies, the Matrix, or the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, capped off with The DaVinci Code.

When I lived in Chicago in the Nineties, I used to listen for kicks to an AM radio station that broadcast nothing but recordings of motivational speakers all day long. The idea, as I understood it, was to provide a sort of service to the itinerant salesman, whom Barbara Ehrenreich describes as “lonely and wounded” but still required to “pick himself up and generate fresh enthusiasm for the next customer, the next city, the next rejection.” By listening to a string of these three or four minute pep talks, the city’s sales force would be able to psyche themselves up to face their next prospect. As for the station’s content, it was pretty much unrelenting sunshine, megadoses of motivation; the main feature distinguishing the various speakers was the homemade theory or idea with which they had souped up the great American idea of positive thinking: Not just positive thinking but positive envisioning. Happy Bible verses. Tricks to make yourself seem like an optimistic person. Words whose letters actually stood for other words that, taken together, were really, really awesome.

When some bureaucrat at the Department of Defense sent a memo to Congress opposing Sen. Al Franken’s amendment to protect victims of rape, the neo-liberal bureaucracy was doing what bureaucracies always do. It was erasing the human in deference to a system, and with it all hope of morally defensible action. In my own case [...]

In October 08 I had the great good fortune to attend what was billed as a debate between teams of progressive and conservative talk show hosts: Thom Hartmann and Stephanie Miller on the left, Bill Handel and Alan Stock on the right. Bill Handel opened the program by saying we shouldn’t expect too much from him, as he had already decided he was voting for Obama. It was left to Alan Stock to spout the right wing talking points we had all expected to hear, which he reliably did.

Perfect timing with this week’s Mardi Gras festivities upon New Orleans, singer, songwriter and badass bass wizard Abby Travis just released a very cool song on iTunes called LIES, featuring The Bangles.

The song was inspired by the Bad Decider in the White House, and the heartbreaking tragedy/fiasco that followed Katrina on his watch.