Neil Tetkowski: Art and Activism in Clay

Neil Tetkowski: Art and Activism in Clay

Neil Tetkowski with one of his massive ceramic disk pieces, World Mandala Monument.   A Global Perspective In Clay   Neil Tetkowski creates art that communicates beyond cultural barriers.  It is with this global perspective that his artwork is embraced...
John Michael Flynn/Travel in Russia’s Far East

John Michael Flynn/Travel in Russia’s Far East

Photo courtesy of the author  Khabarovsk prepares for the annual Ice Fantasy festival. *** Bags, Babushka And Bivayet   by John Michael Flynn Contributing Writer Mid-September, 2015, at one of two baggage carousels at Novy airport in Khabarovsk, capital city of...
In The Trees/Fiction

In The Trees/Fiction

Photo by Matthew T Rader on Unsplash *** In the Trees   by Britnee Meiser Contributor It was the summer of the cicadas. Usually I liked to walk around barefoot, to lie in the grass beneath the great oaks to evade the reach of the July sun’s sweltering rays. I’d...

On Location, France/Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret

  Chloé Bourguigon: Love or what’s left of it   by Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret Reviewer For Cloe Bourguigon love does not leave. Not totally. Like tobacco. Not totally. It’s a disease, an addicition, an alcoholism. As tobacco. Loving does not save. However...

Management by Emotions/by Carlos M. Rodriguez, Ph. D.

  Management by Emotions: The “Artist” Inside Me   by Carlos M. Rodriguez, Ph.D. Contributing Writer Business organizations around the world strive for profitability, growth, and sustainability. Several challenges faced by businesses include the lack of a...
Duda Penteado/Art + Activist = Artivist

Duda Penteado/Art + Activist = Artivist

*** Baby, it’s on you by Mike Foldes Review I had a chance recently to visit the Karl and Helen Burger Gallery at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, where Brazilian-American artist and cultural activist Duda Penteado has a solo show running through to...
Hustlers: Movie Review by Margot Parmenter

Hustlers: Movie Review by Margot Parmenter

Photo credit: STXENTERTAINMENT.COM Scene from Hustlers     In Hustlers, Women Tell the Story   by Margot Parmenter Film Reviewer With Hustlers, writer-director Lorene Scafaria manages to make a story about a gang of strippers who drug and defraud men...
Lotta Lemetti/Photography

Lotta Lemetti/Photography

Lotta filming for her video, Kekta. *** Lotta Lemetti: In Search of Polycultural Identity   Known as a versatile and prolific photographer highly skilled in both digital and analog, Lotta Lemetti has sustained and contributed significantly to the field for years....
Our Back Yard

Our Back Yard

Binghamton Visitor Bureau Photo *** Our Back Yard   The Earth is rich with treasure. We are fortunate to have had the opportunity to mine a bit, and time and again to have hit pay dirt. In addition to the people whose works appear in the links below, there are...

Our Back Yard: Mick McMahon/Poetry

 Death of a Dandelion   The day I died was not just one day. It was a year, maybe two, maybe three – It was slow. It was painful And it went unnoticed. The sun still rose. The day I died, I did not go coughing. There was no sobbing, no wheezing, I did not die...

Our Back Yard: Keery Hastings/Poetry

Body Buried Body burned into a wooden box Or maybe gently paced into a casket; Dug just a bit too high underground. Dressed in a last pair of clothes; Hands to chest – A lonely name ground into pink marbled stone; Settled under the next available lot – The leaves from...

Our Back Yard/Poetry Review by Emily Vogel

Since Sunday   BRITTANY TOMASELLI Distributed for Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.  48 pages | 5 1/2 x 7 | © 2019 Paper $13.95ISBN: 9781632430731Published October 2019   By Emily Vogel Poetry Editor Brittany Tomaselli’s most recent collection of poems, “Since Sunday”...
Our Back Yard: Jules Gotay

Our Back Yard: Jules Gotay

SUBMARINE     The art of Jules Gotay   Language & Perception: Making the Connection   CARNIVAL Artist’s statement: My paintings live on the border between language and the physical world.  They exist in the place where ideas become...
Our Back Yard: KNOW Theater/by Chris Kocher

Our Back Yard: KNOW Theater/by Chris Kocher

  *** Love of Acting Takes Center Stage Binghamton community theater perseveres   by Chris Kocher Contributing Writer The scene: August 1993. A final dress rehearsal for Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana,” the first-ever KNOW...

Our Back Yard: Then & Now, by Stephen Poleskie

  Taking Another Fall   by Stephen Poleskie Columnist At the end of my previous column I had implied that I might write about some of my other falls in the next issue. At the time I did not know that this was going to be Ragazine’s final issue. I thought to...

Our Back Yard: Jim Palombo/Politics

  TRUTH AND TRUST – Through the glass darkly    by James Palombo Politics Editor I was watching the news – democrats and republicans going back and forth about the whistleblower report and the phone call transcript tied to President Trump’s conversation with...

Our Back Yard: Mike Foldes/Poetry

          Dreaming in Hungarian Miskolc, Eger, Budapest, letcho, goulash, paprikash, nem, egan, dobos torte, smooth roads, fenceless fields ideally suited for horse-drawn wagons to leave wakes of  broken grasses, transitory roadways for...
Fabia Wong/In Search Of …

Fabia Wong/In Search Of …

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash; U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong & Macau *** Hong Kong, Neo-Colonialism and the poison pill of identity   By Fabia Chenivesse-Wong Columnist Identity is a contradictory notion. We use it to signify the objective – the...
Ready or Not: Film review by Madeline Dulabaum

Ready or Not: Film review by Madeline Dulabaum

PHOTO: COURTESY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION       Ready or Not: Here Come the Feminists   by Madeline Dulabaum Film Reviewer Aslender young woman dressed in a formal white wedding gown stands at the center of the posters for the 2019 horror flick...

The Days of the Untitled Mona

The Days of the Untitled Mona The transformation from the everyday person into a supreme being   DAY 7   The Mono Lisa: Politics of Sexuality By Pauline Joelle Panetta Edited by Dorothy Louise Zinn The object of analysis central to this essay is Cynthia...

The Number Five… /Book Review

          Bob Heman and Cindy Hochman The Number 5 Is Always Suspect — Collaborative Poems Presa Press, 2019 The Number 5 Is Always Suspect – Collaborative Poems ISBN: none (6” x 9”, paperback, 36 pages ($8.00)     THE NUMBER 5...

Henry Giroux/Political Commentary

  Depoliticization: Deadly Weapon of Neoliberal Fascism   by Henry Giroux Contributing Writer Increasingly, Americans live in an era in which every aspect of society displays symptoms of political, economic and ethical impoverishment. This condition extends...

Marc Darnell/Poetry

Gadget Man is a juicy machine– a talking sack of fluids, no soul, I mean no aura, no spirit seen. If you ask druids if man is a juicy machine they’ll say he’s a stream in sync with all the gods, but no soul.  I mean well, though I seem cold,...

His Back Yard: The City Farmer/by Don Wolfe

  by Donald Wolfe Urban Agrarian What transpires in the mind of a 73-year-old person to decide that it would be a good idea to plant corn in an unused patch of dirt in the middle of Broadway in NYC and become a city farmer? Beats the hell out of me!  The goal for...
OUR BACK YARD: Na Chainkua  (Chainky) Reindorf/Artist Interview

OUR BACK YARD: Na Chainkua (Chainky) Reindorf/Artist Interview

Chainky Reindorf at Brunelli Gallery   Artist updates traditions, blends cultures in her work   Artist Statement My work is informed and inspired by the visual language of West African textiles and the custom of using these textiles as a means of...
Deisboeck’s World

Deisboeck’s World

What’s So Funny?                                                                      ...

Baseball Fans Need to be Civil

Baseball Fans’ Behavior Strikes Out The following short essay was written several years ago… but bears a lesson worth repeating.  The Yankees’ loss Wednesday night to the Boston Red Sox was humiliating, but not nearly as humiliating as the behavior of the...

In Memoriam: Camilla Sohar

    Only if… A Poetry of Loss and Remembrance Poems by Paul Sohar   W When Camilla passed away last spring at the age of 50 due to a medical accident, her family and many friends were shocked, especially her father who had been her principal...

Young Poets of Oneonta

Prompts and New Voices I n the autumn semester of 2018, in my creative writing course at SUNY Oneonta, my students endeavored to write “thematically linked” poems. We read Adele Kenny’s “A Lightness, A Thirst, or Nothing at All,” my book, “Dante’s Unintended Flight,”...
Evan Balkan/Travel

Evan Balkan/Travel

  Evan Balkan Photo Quito Panorama *** “Q”   by Evan Balkan It’s taken twenty-one mostly miserable hours to get to Quito. A flight delay in Baltimore, a subsequent missed connection in Miami, an hour drive from Marical Sucre Airport and here it is, edging up...

PREVIOUS “CONTENTS”

The following lists include Contents from issues beginning with Volume 14, Number 5, September-October 2018. To find specific articles in older issues, use the search box. For issues older than 2010, go to http://old.ragazine.cc and use the search box. Lineup:...

Michael T. Young/Poetry

     Dredging Gulls tow my gaze out beyond the breakwaters and jetties, to coast there among the glass towers. Wind whips the water in me into waves and spindrift. Along all my shores are hardnesses broken down into sand, fragments supposed to equal the history of me....
Ellen Jantzen / Photographer Spotlight

Ellen Jantzen / Photographer Spotlight

©2018  Ellen Jantzen Unexpected Geology #8a Photographer Spotlight   Unexpected Geology Artist Statement In this series I am exploring the realm of one’s environmental surroundings, how that is absorbed into one’s psyche and how this changes through relocations....

Mark Walker/Creative Nonfiction

  My Life in the Land of the Eternal Spring: The Coffee Plantation   By Mark D. Walker Contributor Though I had lived and worked in Guatemala for seven years, it was a brief encounter with my young daughter, Michelle, on the San Francisco Miramar coffee...
Stéphane Vereecken \ Photographer Interview

Stéphane Vereecken \ Photographer Interview

© Stéphane Vereecken                      *** Telling an Unfinished Story   Belgian photographer and artist, Stéphane Vereecken holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Academy of Brussels. He has been actively exhibiting from a young age in cultural centers and...

Ohio Jazz Shorts/Candice Watkins

  Melvin James “Sy” Oliver: Creator of the Lunceford Sound (1910–1988), & Zach Whyte   by Candice Watkins Contributing Writer Aach Whyte attended Wilberforce College in the early 1920s, where he was an early member of Horace Henderson’s Collegians. After...

William Crawford/Flash Fiction

  “It’s like a heat wave…”    A Kool, Kool Fool From The Rock ‘N Roll School Shares A Frigidaire Nightmare.   I pulled into El Paso along about half past dead. The weathered wall thermometer hit 99 in the red! The Band, not Spike Jones, blared out of my...
Augusto De Luca/Photographer Interview

Augusto De Luca/Photographer Interview

© Augusto De Luca                      James Senese                                                                               Lina Sastri  *** “Feeding on Content & Form” An interview with Italian photographer Augusto De Luca   by Chuck Haupt...
Steve Poleskie/Then and Now

Steve Poleskie/Then and Now

Citadelle Laferriere, built between 1805 and 1820 to protect Haiti from invasion. Photo by Stephen Poleskie     Almost Shot Out of the Sky While Flying Over a “Shithole” Country     By Stephen Poleskie Donald Trump’s recent derogatory comment about...

Sue Atkinson/Old Schools, Part 2

    What Happened?   Part 1 of this series highlighted former school buildings in rural upstate New York. This installment explores consolidation, the combining of two or more small school districts into one larger district, the practice that orphaned...

Steve Dalachinsky/Poetry

the stone age   i’m lost – they’ve knocked me back to the stone age – this sick skin in a dream populated by science fiction literates – this terribly lonely dream populated by people into their own heads – gin drinkers & young girls...
Jessica Powell and Meredith Sinclair/Education

Jessica Powell and Meredith Sinclair/Education

JACOB MORCH Photo/Unsplash     No Room for Nice White Teachers When We’re Taking Down the Master’s House   By Jessica Powell and Meredith Sinclair Over the past decade, the dialogue around education reform has gotten louder, at times acknowledging inequities...

Adele Kenny/Poetry

2 Poems by Adele Kenny   Past the Waterline (After Lake with Dead Trees by Thomas Cole) This could be any day, anywhere—either one of us could be the other, momentary deer where the water ends and the forest begins. Whatever hard things we’ve seen—what we’ve...

Fiction/Leslie Brown

  WALKABOUT   by Leslie Brown In the summer of 1969 I told my mother II was going to sublet an apartment in the Cass Corridor. I’d always wanted to live near campus, and this was my last chance, my final quarter of graduate school at Wayne State University....
Nancy Barno Reynolds/Education

Nancy Barno Reynolds/Education

ROSS FINDON PHOTO/ Unsplash   Those Who Can, Teach: Transitioning Through Education   by Nancy Barno Reynolds Education Editor I tell people I’ve been teaching for 30 years and deep down, I feel that’s my truth: summer camp art teacher as a teen, writing tutor...

Teen Pregnancy: A Nurse’s Perspective

  Teenage Pregnancy and Education Challenges   by Mary Ryan The deepest issues faced in educating pregnant teens and teenage mothers are best illustrated by a true story. As a Maternal/Child Public Health Nurse, I am frequently called into the homes of...
Galanty Miller/Re-Tweets

Galanty Miller/Re-Tweets

  Drinking organic water, taking selfies with G-d and other random and eccentric somewhat truisms   by Galanty Miller There are way too many holidays that obligate us to spend time with our families./ I went through the 5 Stages of Death. I saw the musical...

Playlist for Donald Trump

  TAKE TEN Category: Cheerful world invasion videos Song Title: Гуманоид (Humanioid) Artist: ГрУпА СиТрО (Group Sitro) Year: 2007 Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMkILFgEfVM Category: Songs to tango with Melania Song Title: Комарик (Mosquito) Artist: Пётр...

Jim Palombo/Politics

    PRIMA FACIE   by Jim Palombo Politics Editor What the f* is going on? Every so often the crap hits the fan. I mean it’s in the scope of my work to pay attention to and analyze a lot of what’s on our public discussion table. But with all that’s...
Mark Levy/Casual Observer

Mark Levy/Casual Observer

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash   Contraindications: The Game   by Mark Levy Contributing Columnist                  I thought of a new game. I call it Contraindications. Here’s how you play it: I list one or more possible adverse side effects of taking...
Fred’s February Playlist

Fred’s February Playlist

Frank Nagel photo Mary Ocher, with Felix Kubin, one of Fred’s February picks….   TAKE TEN     Category: Forgotten Brazilian Guitarists Song Title: Amor de Argentina Artist: Américo Jacomino Year: 1928 Link:...
Greg Stewart/Around New York

Greg Stewart/Around New York

    January Jazz: What’s Hot When You’re Coming in From the Cold   by Greg Stewart Illustrations by Lidia Moroz Jazz. This large, amorphous, flexible, strange, constructed, improvisational, musical animal breathes life into New York City...
On Location/France

On Location/France

Andelu painter in Vallauris: When reality flies   by Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret Contributing Editor With Andelu the space of the  the picture is decomposed as blown by a contagious  sphere of influence. The artist seems to voice the air and the elements she...
Local Heroes Ride Again/Fred Roberts

Local Heroes Ride Again/Fred Roberts

Fred Roberts photos Illusoir *** Local Heroes Ride Again by Fred Roberts Music Editor/Europe Local Heroes, a 26-year-old institution in Germany, is a dream for anyone with a voracious appetite for music. The events begin around Spring in the various states of Germany,...
Education/Nancy Barno Reynolds

Education/Nancy Barno Reynolds

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash   Critical Literacy, Economic Growth, and the Standards Movement: Are We Speaking the Same Language?   by Nancy Barno Reynolds Education Editor The introduction of ESSA (2016) laws mandated by then-President of the United...
Julie McCarthy/Education

Julie McCarthy/Education

Photo by Bill Wegener on Unsplash *** Uncertain Times for Diverse Learners   by Julie McCarthy A couple of years ago at a New York State conference for teachers of speakers of other languages, we were told that all teachers are teachers of students who speak a...

Monique Gagnon German/Poetry

  Yoga: Just Follow Instructions Yoga is the blocking of mental modifications so that the seer re-identifies with the Self.  – Sage Patanjali Inhale chest arms up, Don’t think about the phone call arms down exhale, bend forward into ragdoll, the tin plane you have to...
Sue Atkinson: Old Schools, Part 1

Sue Atkinson: Old Schools, Part 1

Former Mt. Upton High School   Old Schools – Part 1 The Downsides of Consolidation  In a sunny late fall afternoon, I took a drive up New York State Route 8. Highway 8 originates in the Village of Deposit, winds through small villages and hamlets, passes through...

Meredith Cottle/Poetry

Arrhythmic Morality perhaps I was the devil all along a crumbling and shameless little fool pleading to malicious cards of chance among the dying and their reverence that you should go, my benediction stands, as you have ceased to love or ever thrive, and I have...
Belfast Snaps by Allen Forrest

Belfast Snaps by Allen Forrest

***     About Allen Forrest: Cartoonist/Illustrator. Born in Canada and bred in the U.S., Allen Forrest has worked in many mediums: computer graphics, theater, digital music, film, video, drawing and painting. You can read more about him in About Us....

Scott Thomas Outlar/Poetry

  Center of Your Silken Den Your couch was made of velvet. Supple to the touch. I didn’t notice as my defenses went soft. Waking up, I felt the marks left by your claws. Your teeth were sharp as needles. Subtle with their sting. I should have known the invitation...

Politics/Jim Palombo

Michaela MacPherson illustration *** A Crisis of Identity   by James Palombo Politics Editor I’ve certainly spoken to this theme in previous Ragazine articles. But given my recent trip to Italy and the conversations that followed while there, I think it bears...
Greg Stewart/Around New York

Greg Stewart/Around New York

  “Soft Cough” Plays “High Hopes” Long Island band formed in Western New York   by Greg Stewart Contributing Columnist It’s a dark night in suburban Long Island where the snow lines sidewalks dotted with boxy homes behind green lawns....

Alex Wolkowicz Review/Carl Oprey

  Alex Wolkowicz:  Viscera          Artbreak Gallery New York   by Carl Oprey Contributing Arts Editor Earlier this year I went to two illuminating exhibitions within a few weeks of each other. One was the swanky Jeff Koons show at the Gagosian in...

Henry A. Giroux/Commentary

    Gangster capitalism and nostalgic authoritarianism in Trump’s America   In one year, the Trump regime has wrought immense damage to democracy, culture and thought. But there’s new hope.   by Henry A. Giroux Contributing Editor Just one year into the...

Greg Stewart – On Location/New York

  Marco Maggi, Tod Lippy, Esopus and a Basement Booked   As I entered the Jefferson Public Market Branch of the New York Public Library on 10th Street and 6th Avenue on the night of the reception for “Drawing Set”, I heard a bustling vibration of voices...
Jim Palombo/Politics

Jim Palombo/Politics

xxx xx Happy Campaign Trails to You… xxx Although they can stand alone, here are two pieces linked to each other in several ways. Keep in mind as you read them that there have been a variety of previous Ragazine articles by this author that speak to the concerns being...
Pierre-Jean Amar / Photography Interview

Pierre-Jean Amar / Photography Interview

ExpositionTinguely |1989 All images ©Pierre-Jean Amar. Used with permission. *** *** Friend to Photographers AAA Has His Own Images to Share *** *** With Mike Foldes Founder, Managing Editor Translation by Hélène Gaillet de Neergaard *** *** Ragazine: It’s a...
LOCAL HEROES, 2015, Hamburg

LOCAL HEROES, 2015, Hamburg

Fred Roberts photos Grapefunk, top, performs at the Local Heroes Band Contest in Hamburg, Germany.  *** *** Music Editor Fred Roberts Takes a Spin AAA as Judge in German Battle of the Bands *** *** by Fred Roberts Contributing Music Editor *** What is that magic that...

L’avventura: A long poem by Dwayne Barrick

  A poem after the Antonioni film L’avventura by Dwayne Barrick           L’avventura                              1 You would too like Monica Vitti as Claudia in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura with her impressionable and oval face not a classic...

Tricks of Lights/Poetry Book Review

REVIEW   Tricks of Light: New and Selected Poems by Thad Rutkowski, (New York: Great Weather for Media, 2020) Publication date: April 6, 2020 $18.00 ISBN: 978-0-9981440-7-8 Paperback, 100 pages   By Jim Feast Readers know from poems in Thad Rutkowski’s delightful...

Galanty Miller’s Re-Tweets

    An “honest” Viagra commercial and other randomly generated observations   by Galanty Miller My son wouldn’t eat his vegetables. I said, “You’re a very bad boy.” My girlfriend was immediately attracted to him. She likes bad boys./ I...

Alan Britt

IT’S NOT OVER TILL WE SAY IT’S OVER   That’s why they’re called safety matches; duck your head before striking. That’s when the tarnished Indian elephant coin bank with iron-stripped flathead screw divorced both ribcages spilling wheat pennies, buffaloes, Mercury...
Our Back Yard/Orazio Salati, Artist

Our Back Yard/Orazio Salati, Artist

ORAZIO SALATI Transient Memory | Oil, Wax,Tar on Panel | 72” x 36” *** Visual Conversations   by Sharon Ball Arts Writer in Upstate New York’s Southern Tier & NPR Cultural Editor Painting is the way Orazio Salati has expressed himself since he and his family...

Miriam O’Neal/Poetry Book Review

          Carolyn Welch The Garden of Fragile Beings (2019) Finishing Line Press The Garden of Fragile Beings by Carolyn Welch ISBN:978-1- 63534-736-4 6” X 9”, paperback, 88 pages ($19.99)     A Way of Blossoming    Review by Miriam...

Laura Boss/Poetry

THIS THANKSGIVING   This Thanksgiving my husband and I went to Atlanta       to spend Thursday through Sunday       with his very caring daughter Jim and I had gotten up at 3:20 a.m. and were       at the airport by 5 My new husband ( not so different       from...

Lucy Nell Stewart/Featured Artist: Video

Reality Check     Artist Statement “I find great sustenance in the mother ship and all her elements. Coming from a classical and avant-garde theatre arts background I carry with me the proscenium to composite new worlds with my beloved and always surprising...
A. J. Fries/Artist

A. J. Fries/Artist

The Incident #1 | 48×60 | oil on canvas *** A. J. Fries | In The Mind of the Beholder   Artist’s Statement This ongoing series started with simple portraits of the toys I remembered from childhood, evoking the nostalgia and celebrating the simplistic...