Everyone sees and feels in a unique way; that’s why no two people are precisely the same. If you see or feel something in a work of art ... it is there! Just as we need to learn how to read the written word, the spectator must have a desire to understand the language of art, and the alphabet of a particular artist.

Read more from Art of the Covenant in my Artist’s Statement inside the main site gallery.

When I was living in Brentwood, California, an artist friend who had worked with Oscar Janiger on a book had invited me to meet the well-known psychiatrist.

Oscar was a pioneer in the study of LSD’s potential for liberating the intellect and creativity. He gave LSD to some 1,000 volunteers (1954-1962) before it was made illegal. Oscar was interested in how LSD juiced up creativity, raised consciousness, and for its value as a tool in therapy.

Oscar had a comfortable home in the Santa Monica Canyon area and one of the largest personal libraries I had seen—nearly 20,000 volumes and he seemed to know the location of every title.

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Some years ago in my Los Angeles days, I had met a number of well-know writers—from Harold Robbins to Theodore Sturgeon to drop a couple of names.

Ted, an icon in the science fiction world, used to visit me once a month. As I recall, he was living in Northern California or up in Oregon. He would come into my office with his Amazonian wife who looked after him.

At the time, I was the managing editor of a magazine. Ted was writing a monthly column for the publication. Ted smoked a pipe, his long hair fell onto his beard, and he looked like Johnny Appleseed to me.

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I first heard Ruby: The Adventures of a Galactic Gumshoe on audio cassettes over twenty years ago—and I never forgot her. The series is produced by the nonprofit ZBS Foundation and a special team of artists.

If you want to treat your ears, get the complete Ruby 1 series on CD, shut off the lights, and enter a special world.

The following description is from ZBS:

Ruby is fast-paced and funny intergalactic entertainment the Marx Brothers would be proud of, with slick, splashy high-tech music and effects created by Tim Clark. The music and sound effects are stunning.

On the planet Summa Nulla— the “high point of nothing” —someone is manipulating the media. And Ruby, our hip, tough-talking detective is hired to track down the malefactors.

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Julius Caesar, in Shakespeare’s play, does not heed the soothsayer’s now iconic and prophetic warning: Beware the ides of March, which, up until the bard penned that now famous line, had merely meant the 15th day of March on the calendar.

The play is ripe with omens. Why heed one omen and not another? Are you superstitious?

The play contains some of the most often quoted bits of biting dialog in Western literature.  Here are a few that will certainly sound familiar.

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