Alexander Stuart

Photograph  Copyright  © 1972   2013 Alexander Chow-Stuart. Happy Valentine's Day to my beautiful wife, Charong! This passage from Pablo Neruda's exquisite Sonnet XVII expresses my love far more perfectly than I can: " I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving  but this, in which there is no I or you,  so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close. " - Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII

Courtesy of The Palm Beach Post. Today and tomorrow are filled with celebrations for the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Snake , which begins tomorrow, Sunday January 10, 2013. The snake is associated with wisdom and influence, and is sometimes considered the "Little Dragon," the second most powerful and lucky among the twelve Chinese Zodiac creatures. There are various legends regarding the origins of the Chinese calendar, and the order of the animals in it. One is that the Buddha invited all the animals to come , either to join him on New Year's Day or to share his last day on Earth, and some of the animals - sometimes the snake, sometimes the rat, depending upon the telling - hitched a ride on the ox and jumped off, thus arriving first. Among those born in the Year of the Snake are Brad Pitt , Bob Dylan , Virginia Woolf , Oprah Winfrey and Mao Tse-tung. You can read more about the Year of the Snake in this post by US/China business and educationa

Original Article "Starman Over The Rainbow" Copyright  © 1972 Alexander Stuart; Photographs Copyright  © 1972 Mick Rock. Original Article  "Starman Over The Rainbow"  Copyright  © 1972 Alexander Stuart;  Photographs Copyright  © 1972 Mick Rock. In honor of my birthday week - and the release of David Bowie's wonderful new song and video, Where Are We Now?  - I am reproducing here one of the earliest pieces of professional writing of my career, Starman Over The Rainbow, a review of David Bowie's legendary Ziggy Stardust show on Saturday, August 19, 1972 at London's Rainbow Theatre - a show that introduced multi-media theater and mime to rock music, not to mention challenging the sexual, cultural and musical stereotypes of the day. I was seventeen at the time that I wrote this review. I had recently been invited by editor Robin Bean to write professionally (while still at the British equivalent of high school, Bexley Grammar School) for Fi

The War Zone Kindle Edition. The Kindle price of my novel The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition  is now $4.99. A dark, ironic, emotionally-charged novel about incest, adolescent fury and parental morality, the novel won Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (now the  Costa Book Awards ) when it was first published, only to have the prize snatched away amid public controversy when one of the judges politicked behind the scenes. Dubbed a contemporary  Catcher in the Rye  by Time Out magazine,  The War Zone  was turned into a powerful multi-award-winning film by Oscar-nominated actor-director  Tim Roth , which premiered at Sundance and went on to attract great acclaim at film festivals around the world.  The film can be  streamed  from  Netflix  and is available on  DVD  through  Amazon . The War Zone is available  FREE ON KINDLE TO AMAZON PRIME MEMBERS.

True, and very sad. Why not have the TSA regularly inspect everyone's guns, wherever they are? Guns are weapons of mass destruction. It is also sickening that the ranking of politicians in this country by the National Rifle Association has any significance at all. There should at least be a Second Amendment protection of the Right To Wear Shoes.