Hanukkah Lights - Illustrations by Jiří Běhounek

Jewish Tales - Second Light. About kings David and Solomon
1. The riddles of the Queen of Sheba
2. Solomon and Asmodeus

Jewish Tales - Fourth light. About powerful sovereigns and famous rabbis who once lived in the Holy Land
3. Rabbi Hanina ben Dossa
4. Honi Hameagel
5. Rabbi Ishmael and the Oneiromancer

Jewish Tales - Fifth light. About Sephardi Jews living in Orient and South Europe
6. A Son warned
7. A Real dream

Jewish Tales - Sixth Light. About Ashkenazi Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe
8. How Rabbi Loew created the Golem
9. Pinkhas and the Count

Louise Bourgeois - The View from the Bottom of the Well

The trees have risen one more time - Photographs by Robert Adams

1. Cape Blanco State Park, Curry County, Oregon.

2, 3. Sitka spruce, Capo Blanco State Park, Curry Country, Oregon.

4. Fort Columbia State Park, Pacific Country, Washington.

5. Cape Blanco State Park, Curry County, Oregon.

6. Clatsop County, Oregon.

. . . the trees have risen one more tìme

and the night wind makes them sound

like the sea that is yet unknown

the black clouds race over the moon

the rain is falling on the last place

W. S. Merwin

7. On Humburg Mountain, Clatsop Country, Oregon.

after an age of leaves and feathers

someone dead

thought of this mountain as money

and cut the trees

that were here in the wind

in the rain at night

it is hard to say it

W. S. Merwin

8, 9. An eroding clearcut, Pacific County, Washington.

Erosion is an inevitable consequence of clearcutting. No people in history have clearcut without damaging the soil. If one turns a globe—China, India, the Near East, Europe, the eastern seaboard of the United States, the upper Midwest—one is reminded that some degree of long-term deforestation has been the rule with clearcutting, and that this in turn has resulted in the diminishment of whole societies. Significantly, China has recently "stopped clearcutting native forests" and has "subsidized retraining of hundreds of thousands of loggers". The Oregonian, January 25, 2004.

10. Clatsop Country, Oregon.

Jellied gasoline (napalm) is sometimes used to speed the burning of waste.

11. Coos Country, Oregon.

Occasionally a tree will grow on top of an early stump. Here the second tree has itself been cut.

12. Harney Country, Oregon.

Josef Albers - Homage to the Square

Only with the Homage to the Square series did Albers finally arrive at a brillant way of demonstrating color phenomena. Besides, the quadrangle is a form codified by Malevich, an intellectual form. The quadrangle expresses new thoughts. Albers transforms it into a physical-psychic reality full of suspense. He offers us hundreds of variations. He uses different schemata. He uses either three or four colors. The visual fusion of three or four quadrangles reminds us of graphic exercises (Graphic Tectonic) and of exercises which originated in the preliminary course at the Bauhaus. At one point the small middle form seems to step out of the picture, and then again it seems to withdraw into its very depth. This back-and-forth on which the plastic perception of these interlaced color zones is dependent, is modified by illumination. In clear daylight a blue zone remains dark and deeply hidden in the picture frame, while in the twilight (or waning light) the complete opposite is true: the red loses brightness, the blue assumes an increasingly powerful glow.
There is no particular reason for any of the different schemata; they serve only to solve various problems of quantity. There are certain schemata which balance the participation of colors more strongly than others. They all have one thing in common: the horizontal symmetry is in sharp contrast to the vertical, asymmetric seriation. Thus zones are created of different chromatic activity. In the ribbon-shaped small strips which lie in the lower half of the picture, the picture produces ar more colorific effect than in the other more broadly planned zones. Everywhere, however, the important point is the alternating modification of colors. A color which lies between two others is influenced by them; the color of the panel on the right is being repeated along the border line on the left, and on the right border line it is the color of the panel on the left. Over and above the actually used colors, new optical mixtures are created.

Josef Albers (born March 19, 1888, Bottrop, Ger.—died March 25, 1976, New Haven, Conn., U.S.)

Salt land

The wetland and saltmarshes of Guérande photographed by Paul Morin.