Saturday, April 27 is Slow Art Day, an international celebration of taking the time to look at art works in a more prolonged and demanding way. There are currently more than 250 venues at museums and galleries throughout the world, where Slow Art Day hosts will invite groups...

I'm a big fan of Benjamin Weaver, the Jewish prize-figher turned "thief taker," who is the hero of David Liss's The Devil's Company, the third in the series of crime novels set in 18th century London. (The other two are The Whiskey Rebels and A Conspiracy of Paper.) Liss writes...

If you're in the area, don't miss the rare opportunity for a Richard Jackson retrospective exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art. In fact, it's worth traveling a good long way to see. I'm surprised to be informed that it will travel (see schedule below) despite the...

I read the last pages of The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes before turning out the light last night. I wanted to like it more than I actually did. I wanted to like the narrator more than I did. Looking back on events from the perspective of approaching...

(With apologies to Rainer Maria Rilke.) Joost de Jonge is a Dutch artist based in Amsterdam. You'll find images of his paintings at his website.

Dear Joost,

First, my warm thanks for your package of books and catalogues. I'm honored by your interest in my writing and by...

Jaimal Yogis is the kind of writer who is willing to plumb the depths of his own lived experience -- and his own heart -- for his material. I'm not surprised to find him quoting Michel de Montaigne, the granddaddy of this approach to writing that...

I've no doubt I'll have more thoughts about Caravaggio -- and more informed ones -- when I've finished reading the new book about him, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. I bought it at the museum bookshop on leaving the current Los Angeles County Museum of...

As anyone knows who has followed its fortunes over the past few decades, the story of contemporary art in Los Angeles has been a peripatetic one. The center of energy has shifted variously from La Cienega to La Brea to Downtown, out to Venice and Santa Monica and back east...

It's hard to explain why I keep reading a book as dreadfully bad as John Grisham's The Confession to the end. In part it's out of that old addiction I have written about before: the need to know how the story will unfold. All stories, for me at least, are...

I'm a pretty good sleeper under normal circumstances. As Ellie says, I'm usually asleep before my head hits the pillow. At my age, of course, nature tends to call at least once, sometimes twice and, on rare occasions, more often in the course of the night. Unless I have something...

Anyone who has been around the Los Angeles art world for the past... um... 60 years can't fail but be astonished by the way in which Ed Moses -- dare I call him the "dean" of Southern California painters without provoking his ire? -- continues to produce great bodies of...

... it is shameful that any person be required to stand in line for eight hours to cast a ballot, yet this is happening in Florida and elsewhere. It is shameful that election officials should be involved in efforts to make voting harder, rather than facilitate it. That private citizens...

In the coming days before the election, I intend to devote my daily Buddhist meditation practice to sending wishes of goodwill to American voters on both sides of the political spectrum, from far left to far right. May they base their decisions on the principles of compassion, justice, wisdom, and...

Ah, the art fair! What started to take root perhaps 20 years ago in a couple of places like Basel and Chicago is now a veritable forest. Every major city seems to have adopted one, along with a lot of minor cities, too. The art fair is loud, unabashedly promotional...

I can't help myself. The Buddhist in me tells I should be equanimous, but I woke angry in the middle of the night and, breathe as I might, I have not been able to dispel the anger.

The pundits were telling us, before last night's Great Debate -- as...

I'll admit to being more than once annoyed along the way as I read Brian Leaf's new book, Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi: My Humble Quest to Heal My Colitis, Calm My ADD, and Find the Key to Happiness. Which is not a bad thing -- getting annoyed, I...

One of the interesting things about the Buddhist teachings is that they are built upon so rational a foundation of elegant logic, and for this reason lend themselves readily to systematic application.  A while ago, Dr. Barbara Wright took advantage of this aspect of the religion to come up with...

We look askance today at what was done in the 19th century in the name of empire and world-wide dominion.  The European powers engaged in the Great Game of colonial expansion felt free to wander the globe appropriating whole countries, peoples and natural resources to enhance their political and economic...

As I promised the other day, it has been 17th, 18th, and now 19th century London at The Buddha Diaries... The Professor and the Madman opens on the dark streets of Lambeth in Victorian England, an industrial slum at that time, inhabited by poverty-stricken working-class families -- as well as...

I generally tend to avoid long books.  It's partly laziness, I suppose, and partly its close relative, impatience.  But it's also partly out of a genuine belief that what can be said in 600 pages can often be said as well in two.  Two hundred, then.  I harbor the belief...