Category Archives: Arts: Photography

Colorism & Daylilies: A Confession

In both places, and along innumerable roads between, beginning  mid-spring of each year the orange daylilies gawked and mocked at me from their roadside strongholds. I grimly respected their endurance, but it was clear my death stares failed to faze them.

And finally there was some relief, even during the tough southern summers: my mail delivery days were behind me. I had scrabbled over the threshold into the large category of southerners who wisely regard central air to be fully as vital to survival as water, barbecue or even Duke’s Mayonnaise.

Maybe it was only after I became re-acclimatized, several years into this southern sojourn, that I was ready to take in a startling revelation: turning a corner in some verdant neighborhood, I beheld a familiar green stalk, but one topped by a bloom of an unfamiliar hue.

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The Deaths Of Racism, And Racism In Deaths

Helena then beckoned us through an opening in the low wall, into what seemed an empty field.
This plot was meant to be added to the cemetery (since UVA professors keep stubbornly falling short of immortality). But when archaeologists tested the ground, they discovered that it too was full of unmarked, and previously unknown graves.

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“Spotlight”: A Movie About Reporters: A Treatise On Evil

Early Spotlight Team investigations in the Boston Globe usually took aim at public corruption, of which Boston seemingly had an endless supply. I never met any of the team writers; they kept a low profile, but the group provided a model of getting the dirt, getting it straight, and getting the story out, that sticks with me to this day.

Looking back, there’s one more big jolt of reality for me in the film: it came as Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams, as reporters Mike Rezendes and Sacha Pfeffer, compile a list of more than seventy Boston priests with pedophile track records –using the real names that the Spotlight Team unearthed. The list scrolled down the screen, and one name jumped out: as a cub reporter, I had met and interviewed one of the priests on the list.

Father Paul Shanley, about the time I interviewed him. I had no clue. Neither did anyone else. Except his victims, which were already numerous.

It was in the early Seventies, and Father Paul Shanley presented as a hip young cleric, with long hair, pursuing a “street ministry” to runaways, pushing the stodgy church envelope. I took him to be in the orbit of Catholic antiwar radicals like the Berrigan brothers, whom I had also interviewed.
Exposed thirty years later by Spotlight writer Sacha Pfeiffer, played by Rachel McAdam in the film, he was brought up on multiple charges of child rape, and in 2005 sentenced to 12-15 years in prison.
At the time I talked to him, he was deep into his boy raping career. I never had a clue.

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