For my Musical Paris class, the homework last weekend was to watch Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Moulin Rouge! and honestly it was a hysterical work of art. It fit perfectly into the lectures that week about nineteenth-century café-concerts and cabaret artistiques in Montmartre, a popular little neighborhood in Paris. At night, poverty-stricken writers would come to these cafés…
When the three of us entered Dixon Gallery & Gardens in early September, sunlight was glinting on the leaf-twisted gate we passed through. Two brick columns were joined by a wooden arch with fluted gables on top. From there we emerged into a little sunlit garden with a fountain in the center, a dark globe…
Summer sounds like cicadas to me, mainly. Cicadas back in Seoul were gleaming creatures whose metallic singing could be heard clean across the schoolyard and through the window into my second-floor math class. Here in Hamilton, they’re a little more elusive; they’re invisible amidst the leafy boughs, but their voices have the same high-energy vibration, a shiny sound….