The evergreen needles on the collection of seventeen species of pine trees in the four-acre Arthur Ross Pinetum arboretum in Central Park in New York City evergreen stay put through all seasons. May hope and joy stay equally firmly ensconced in your heart throughout the year ahead, come what may.

I am starting a new phase of the Blued Trees project with legal graffiti: @legalgraffitiAR.

Not much to show yet except some chicken scratches but it’s the revival of an opera I had been working on before the pandemic. The pandemic has changed so much about my thinking about platforming, venue and audience that my ideas about what I want to do and how have transformed my plans. It has also pushed me to consider how I want to present work that could be shown in more conventional indoors space, such as my brilliant young intern, Elia Min Emery recently assembled for my website https://www.avivarahmani.com/3d-virtual-gallery.

I am not a writer. I write, read and admire people who are real writers, such as all the writers in the recent New York Times celebration of 125 years of the Book Review https://www.nytimes.com/series/book-review-anniversary. I mostly read either science or science fiction and have no patience for bad writing in the former. I define bad writing as shallow characters, lack of narrative tension, too much sex & violence, absence of any compelling question, like, what if dogs ruled the planet and humans chased balls? But in the process of writing two books recently, one of my own and another a co-edited anthology, I have learned a lot about writing.