Mitch Wagner

“Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade, who died from an overdose of alcohol and Valium 13 years ago, is the subject of a new documentary, “Art for Everybody,” by Miranda Yousef.

Kinkade’s fans adore him, made him a ubiquitous cultural icon and built him a financial empire. But he was an alcoholic, accused of multiple instances of sexua harassment, and lost a $3 million court case for defrauding gallery owners, writes Veronica Esposito at The Guardian

“One of my guiding lights is that you have to love your subject,” Yousef told Esposito. “You can see in the film if a film-maker is contemptuous of the subject, and that gets in the way of telling a good and true story.”

Kinkade’s story engages questions about “what is art and who gets to decide, the politicization of taste, and the cost of turning yourself into a brand,” Esposito writes.

Arguably Kinkade’s most prescient stroke was how he turned himself into a brand, obtaining a kind of quasi-influencer status years before there were social media networks capable of delivering fame and fortune. He reached his ubiquity the old fashioned way, through brick-and-mortar stores, a PBS TV show à la Bob Ross, endless merchandising opportunities, and an unbelievable hustle ethic. He even trademarked the “Painter of Light” moniker for himself. (Yousef does point out that the British Romantic artist JMW Turner beat him to that nickname by a good 150 years.)

Melody Schreiber / The Guardian: Measles deaths include a 6-year-old girl, whose parents appeared on a video spreading deadly anti-vaccine lies soon after her death. They appeared in a video with Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organiation previously headed by RFK Jr.

“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” said the girl’s mother, referring to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. “The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it,” she said of her four other children.

“It’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be,” the father said through a translator. Both parents fought back tears throughout the interview.

“The measles wasn’t that bad” — but all four of their kids got it and one died. Heartbreaking.

Nicole Baca, a 40-year-old registered nurse in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, talks with the Union-Tribune’s Paul Sisson about her struggle with Long Covid. Her symptoms closely resemble people close to me:

Today, she’s grateful if she can take a walk at Ocean Beach with her husband, an act that requires meticulous pre-planning to avoid the racing pulse that can make her dangerously dizzy.

“Once, I had an episode where I almost passed out in a neighbor’s driveway,” she said. “I bent down to pick something up that was on the ground, and everything started to turn white.”

…

This never-ending fight started in June of 2020 when she found herself becoming strangely confused during a shift in a COVID-19 unit at the San Diego hospital where she worked. These were the days when health care workers were isolating themselves from their families, often staying in hotel rooms when off duty.

“My last day at work, I caught myself forgetting what I was doing, and I felt like I was on cold medicine, but I wasn’t,” she said. “I developed shortness of breath, a fever, fatigue, extreme bone pain, cough, diarrhea and dizziness.

“I was stumbling into the walls of my hotel room. Weirdly enough, I never lost my sense of taste or smell like most people did at the time.”

Most see such symptoms gradually resolve. For Baca, they worsened, permanently causing her body to overreact to small changes in elevation. Just standing up sends her pulse racing, the heart monitor in her Apple Watch warning of a dangerously erratic heartbeat. Such cardiac overcorrection causes her blood pressure to drop, increasing the chances that she will faint.