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Black Lamb

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Black Lamb was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Published monthly. (more)

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December 2007 in Black Lamb

Volume 5, Number 12 — December 2007

December 1st, 2007

In this, our largest issue ever, John Vergin tells a tale of Christmas in a small town in A Christmas Story. In our page 2 feature, Rebecca Owen reflects on the joys of pet ownership in Man’s Best Friend. A Spoiled Christmas tells why Cate Garrison’s holiday will be tainted by an evil man.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Month summaries | Link to this Entry

October-November 2007 in Black Lamb

Volume 5, Numbers 10-11, October-November 2007

October 1st, 2007

The All Suburbia Issue

In our cover story, Terry Ross muses on what constitutes a suburb and remembers how many important things were absent from the suburban home of his youth. In our page 2 feature, Frankly Snobbish, Cate Garrison recalls how difficult it was for her to feel creative in suburbia. Gillian Wilce wonders whether suburbia is a state of mind in Not Suitable for Sidcup. City boy Ed Goldberg recalls his own youth in suburban Long Island in Train to Nowhere. In Norway, Lorentz Lossius goes Fishing in Suburbia.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Month summaries, All Suburbia Issue | Link to this Entry

September 2007 in Black Lamb

Volume 5, Number 9 — September 2007

September 1st, 2007

In our cover story, In Memoriam Beverly Sills, David Maclaine pays tribute to the opera star. In Our page 2 feature, Who’s Minding the Store?, Cervine Kauffman wonders why people who work in groceries know nothing about groceries. Lorentz Lossius discovers his ancestors in the small Norwegian town of Røros. A fatal accident is taken in stride in Rebecca Owen’s Stroke of Fate.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Month summaries | Link to this Entry

August 2007 in Black Lamb

Volume 5, Number 8 — August 2007

August 1st, 2007

The All City Issue

In our cover story, Terry Ross takes a close look at an overrated city: Portland, Ore. In Cityhell 2007, our page 2 feature, Greg Roberts maintains that cities are now obsolete. Elizabeth Hart (Remembering New York) harks back to a gentler, better time in America’s premier metropolis. In Oslo, Lorentz Lossius describes the capital of his native country. Cate Garrison wonders: What Is a City?

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Month summaries, All City Issue | Link to this Entry

July 2007 in Black Lamb

Volume 5, Number 7 — July 2007

July 1st, 2007

In our cover story, Fighting Words, Ed Goldberg explores the thin line between verbal abuse and an invitation to violence. In Certifiable, our page 2 feature, Dean Suess examines the nut cases behind bars. Dan Peterson describes an island of Italy and yet separate from it in Sardegna. In North and South, Gillian Wilce explains how London is divided into two different worlds. Actor William Bogert didn’t find much work recently in L.A., but he made out all right in Underworked and Overpaid.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Month summaries | Link to this Entry

June 2007 in Black Lamb

Volume 5, Number 6 — June 2007

June 1st, 2007

The Black Lamb Review of Books

In our cover story Terry Ross wonders how people find time to read books and talks about the 14 books on his shelf waiting to be read. In our page 2 feature, Tales from the Crypt, Ed Goldberg reviews two books haunted by dead white American authors. In A Lot of Learning, William Bogert offers an appreciation of memoirs by Dick Francis and Anne Fadiman. Cate Garrison reviews The Bookseller of Kabul in We Believe Her. You Read It Here First: Terry Ross celebrates the reissue of Evelyn Waugh’s travel books, the 5-volume autobiography of Leonard Woolf, and Irene Handl’s wonderful The Sioux, published in 1965.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Books and Authors, All Book Issue, Month summaries | Link to this Entry

May 2007 in Black Lamb

Volume 5, Number 5 — May 2007

May 1st, 2007

READ THIS ENTIRE ISSUE IN THE ENTRIES BELOW

In our cover story Greg Roberts humorously exposes America’s remaining — and flourishing — child-labor sweatshop: newspaper delivery. In our page 2 feature, California Dreaming, Terry Ross finds a serious clash of cultures on a road trip to southern California. Actor William Bogert reveals that for him The Best Show Ever was a stage production of Peter Pan more than 50 years ago. Lorentz Lossius (In and Out of God’s Ear) ranges from Melbourne to New York to the Pacific Northwest as a professional cathedral singer.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Month summaries | Link to this Entry

Slave children at dawn

If you're Superman, you just might make the minimum wage.

May 1st, 2007

BY GREG ROBERTS

Thank you, Mr. Dickens, for having alerted us to the appalling scourge of child labor. Your good work helped end the abomination of children picking rags and bones from the banks of the Thames, or walking the filthy streets with a bucket, collecting feces for the tanneries.

What’s that, I spoke too soon? You say the slavery continues? Quite so, governor —thousands of children are slouching through the snow and rain, hard-pressed and sleep-deprived, scrounging for coolie wages.

They are newsboys. They ride their bicycles through the dark streets at four a.m., when the methamphetamine addict is still tacking out at 3,000 rpms, when the angry drunk is pulling the tab on his fourteenth beer, when vicious dogs are at the peak of paranoia.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Roberts | Link to this Entry

California dreaming

Cultures clash in the land of plenty.

May 1st, 2007

hearstcastle-copy.jpgBY TERRY ROSS

Even when you’ve made up your mind to relax and take your mind off the workaday world, when you want nothing more challenging than a nice view, good meals, and no alarm clock — in short, when you go on vacation — the world and its issues have a way of insinuating themselves.

The road trip to Los Angeles that Cervine and I made just after Christmas seemed like it would be about as weighty as an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. On our itinerary were stops at Hearst Castle, sightseeing in Santa Barbara and Ojai, meanderings in Hollywood, a visit to the Huntington complex in Pasadena with a tour of the (Procter &) Gamble house, as well as a detour south to see the Queen Mary and, finally, a ramble round J. Paul Getty’s villa in Malibu.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Ross | Link to this Entry

The best show ever

May 1st, 2007

BY WILLIAM BOGERT

arthurjean-copy.jpgA while ago I wrote about often having been asked who was the best I’d ever worked with, and the difficulty of giving a definitive answer. Less frequently I’m asked what was the best performance I’ve ever seen. That’s an easy one: Jean Arthur as Peter Pan.

Considering how well I remember details of that performance, it’s perhaps surprising that I can’t think of the year, but this is being written from Los Angeles and I don’t have access to my records in New York: suffice it to say that it was comfortably over half a century ago. A few years later there was another production, also a musical, with Mary Martin. It was very well received, and later done on television, and quite a lot of people remember it, and it suffered greatly (in my opinion) by comparison with the Arthur version.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Bogert | Link to this Entry

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