Harper’s Bazaar Art Issue 2025

The image is a photo of Harper's Bazaar Art issue theme.

Today Art is censored. Literature is Art. Living our lives is an artistic expression of ourselves in motion. We can be alive and animated or gorgeous and grieving.

The whole kit of our emotions deserves to be expressed. Everyone is an Artist in our own way. Our mind is the medium for our thoughts. Our body is the medium for illustrating our physical nature out on the street.

Even an accountant who crunches numbers is creative when they come up with ways to save a client money or maximize their profits.

Ever since December 2019 I’ve identified as an Artist. Feel free I would tell everyone to follow your heart and make whatever kind of art rocks your world as a creator.

And this is the rub: We are all creators. Even though some of us through their negative words and beliefs are destroyers.

I want to be on the side of affirming the dignity of Life of everyone living on Earth.

In this season should you celebrate a holiday I hope you find cheer and comfort in whatever the theme of your holiday is.

Make Art I tell you all of my followers. Everything and anything can be a work of Art when we expand our notion of what is an artistic endeavor.

Walking down the street in winter holding a cardboard cup of hot chocolate. As you go home from a Starbucks you dipped into after you got out of the train.

Even in the movement down the street I say you are being artistic holding the cup. Like walking down a runway.

Let’s celebrate Art this month along with Harper’s Bazaar.

It’s time to valorize making Art instead of what appears to be going on: The destruction of dignity and compassion for those of us who DV8 by censoring Artists who champion these subjects in their work.

The definition of normal is “average or ordinary or of or conforming to a standard or type.”

It’s too late in history to keep things opaque about the value of every human being no matter their color creed or orientation.

We need to bring to light everywhere Art is created the soul of our humanity. Not allow our creativity to be crushed by the forces that be.

And hey I’ll end here with this: Why can’t an Artist portray ordinary people like the woman and man in the painting titled if I remember American Gothic?

What if it was seen as ordinary that a person could love who they want to love or have a body that they love despite others hating or fearing that body or expression of love?

Love wins. That’s the message I want to spread as I celebrate Christmas in a spiritual way not religious way.

Making Art is an expression of Love. We cannot be deterred from making Art today when everything matters.

And sometimes speaking out through our Art is as simple and effective as walking down that street and taking up space holding the cup of hot chocolate in our hands.

Self-Acceptance

Years ago a Nike print ad featured athletes with the tag line “Make Yourself.”

In the end, that’s what a person does in recovery: you have the chance to make yourself into who you want to be.

You don’t have to get a J.D. or M.D. You don’t have to do what I do.

You just have to be the kind of person that it gives you joy to be (regardless of the number on the bathroom scale).

Surprise–I think about the beauty and benefit of “self-acceptance” as a mantra in recovery.

If you’re not happy being you, ask yourself why exactly you’d rather be someone else. Change what you can of what you don’t like, and live with and forget the things you can’t change.

I’m 52–next week I will write about my 25th anniversary of being in remission.

Here now I want to write about self-acceptance because it’s the secret to feeling good about yourself. It could help to define what makes you a true original.

I would say my personality is “creative-kinetic.” Like the athletes in the Nike ad, I understand that there’s a power in creating yourself.

What I’m possessed with right now is a Deborah Harry quote. In a magazine, she said that all artists go “inching and crawling” towards their situation.

That sums up recovery: it too often involves going “inching and crawling” toward each goal; each milestone; each victory.

I will write more about recovery in here in my own inimitable way in the coming weeks–because it needs to be said what I have to say.

I’ll end here with this prelude: if you’re an artist, you cannot ever not do your art.

If you’re in recovery, you have to be true to yourself.

A good first step to embracing who you are is to remember that a mental health diagnosis is simply a tool for getting the treatment you need. It’s not who you are.

I call using your diagnosis to define yourself–I call this an “identity straitjacket.”

The beauty of living in recovery is that you get to decide how you want to describe yourself. That’s how I hit on my own two-word statement.

Try out your own self-definition. Meet me here next week when I talk about how I’ve been in remission for 25 years.

Optimism

optimism

Years ago I wrote in a prior incarnation of this blog about the New York City subway MetroCard fare card that I saved with the word Optimism in black letters on the white back.

Two or three years ago I attended an art class and created the above collage with the word Optimism.

The significance in choosing to make a collage of letters spelling Optimism is this: At the same time I had read the book The Difference by Jean Chatzky that details what financially well-off and wealthy individuals have in common in terms of traits.

It turns out that having optimism is one of the traits shared by people who acquire great fortune in life–and I dare say it helps us emotionally as well as financially to be optimistic.

My great friend has turned around my thinking in this regard. His nonchalance about the turn of events in America has prompted me to want to focus on the positive.

Hence the reproduction of the word Optimism as the banner for this blog entry.

I still think as I’ve always thought that the government can’t solve society’s ills.

Yet each person living in America has the potential to change their lives for the better.

The hypocritical thinking and the inconsistencies in policies that plague Republicans are going to be left by the wayside in this blog even though I’m tempted to reprise exposing them.

Instead I will focus on the positive: you want to amass a ton of money for yourself?–Be an optimist. Optimists live longer too.

When the glass is half full it’s time to drink up.

We should all be so fortunate in America that our only dilemma right now is that our iPhone doesn’t send photos to our e-mail as soon as we upload them.

Thus I went with Plan B: uploading Optimism.

Christmas and Hanukkah arrive in five weeks and Kwanzaa is right around the corner too.

Time to remember those of us who are less fortunate. Time to remember that all things considered it’s still a great time to be living in America.

Time to remember those who are gone and to carry on their legacy.

I’m a big fan of the Kwanzaa principles by the way. One of them is cooperative economics.

We all should be sharing our wealth–and share the wealth of our God-given gifts and the wealth of ideas we have for making the world a better place.

Becoming wealthy in more ways than just financially starts with health: having a fit mind and a strong body.

So in this regard I will start to post on the weekends new blog entries about nutrition and fitness over at the Flourish blog.

Salut!

Tablescapes

House Beautiful magazine features a page devoted to tablescapes with elegant place settings. It’s one of my favorite features of the magazine.

What resonates with me about this is that tablescapes are the perfect living metaphor for artistic expression.

It should come as no surprise that I’m also an Artist/Creative archetype. In the blog over the years I’ve talked about creativity and mental health. I’ve talked about my days as a disc jockey. I’ve talked about fashion and music.

I’ve long wanted to create things of beauty to give others. Those of us who are artists should be supported and encouraged to express ourselves through our chosen medium or media.

Too often artists are told to do what will earn us tons of money regardless of whether we’d be truly unhappy in a blue pinstripe suit life. My contention is that a person can have emotional riches even though they’re not financially well-off.

I want to tell all the artists and creative folk reading this blog that it’s OK to be who you are. Others in society might bow down before Kim Kardashian and people who get famous for being rich and beautiful.

I say: refrain from being snowballed.

According to Caroline Myss anyone with an Artist/Creative archetype will truly be successful in life only when they’re creating their art. So that it doesn’t matter if we have the adoration of millions or just ten followers or only do our art to please our soul.

She rightly states that a lot of Artist/Creatives might not ever get rich or become famous. Something as simple as creating a tablescape or decorating your apartment in style constitutes the true hallmark of this archetype.

I find this all so fascinating about archetypes.

Thus I want to support other artists and say: rock on!

Fall Dinner Party Theme – Missoni

Possibly this will inspire you to host your own elegant soiree.

Archetypes

I titled my memoir Left of the Dial to signal having an organic life where a person’s thoughts and feelings are in synch.

As a disc jockey, I read the VU meter to measure the level of sound intensity of the music. If the needle veered to the right in the red, it was too loud. If it was to the left of the dial the sound was in balance.

So too when your thoughts and feelings are noisy and chaotic–veering into the red–that could signal dis-ease. I co-opted the term left of the dial to connote that you can have a full and robust life doing what gives you joy. And that doing what you love is the way to achieve optimal mental health.

A book I’m reading corroborates what I’ve been writing about all along. The Carolyn Myss book Archetypes lists the features of the 10 primary archetypes. I’m all for honoring and nurturing everyone’s archetype(s) so that each of us can live a happy, healthy life.

Too often we convince ourselves to do or not do something and this could restrict us and make us ill. These are the “myths” the author talks about for each archetype. Failing to live up to your archetype can cause illness and dis-ease.

Not surprisingly I discovered I’m a Fashionista. For this archetype: “beauty and fashion carry projection of your journey of self-empowerment and inner growth to a degree unmatched in any other archetype.”

In Left of the Dial I documented this love of fashion. A couple of reviewers protested this. Yet scratch below the surface and how a person styles herself can be an act of freedom to be our authentic selves.

Myss rightly asserts that discovering your archetype(s) can free you to make the right choices in life–in a career, in a relationship, in how you live and act in the world.

I recommend that you go on the Archtypes website and take the quiz to determine your Top 3. Discovering them and living in tune with them could possibly help shift the needle to the left where everything is in harmony.

It’s a fascinating study and it appears eerily accurate just like the personality type quiz and other self-assessment measurements that are out there on the Internet–like the Kolbe A Index and the CareerMatchmaker I talked about in the Flourish blog.

I’m all for using these kinds of tools that can help a person in recovery live a balanced life of purpose and passion.