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...
JFL Unwraps the Candy in “Crimes” by Fred Roberts Music Editor About a year ago the trio Just Friends and Lovers (Veronika Adamski, Lina Gärtner, Magdalena Gasser) moved their base of operations from Graz to the big city Vienna, and now...
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...
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...
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: 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...
*** 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...
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 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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
*** 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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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:...
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....
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...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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:...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
*** 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....
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...
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...
“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: 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Updated approximately six times a year, is a collaboration of emerging and established artists, writers, poets, musicians, photographers, travelers and interested others, with a goal to promote an eclectic selection of subject matter to an international audience. Please carefully read submission guidelines before sending material.
The name Ragazine was coined in the mid-’70s in Columbus, Ohio, as the title of an alternative newspaper/magazine put together by a group of friends. It was revived in 2004 as ragazine.cc, the on-line magazine of arts, information and entertainment, a collaboration of artists, writers, poets, photographers, travelers and interested others. And that’s what it still is.
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