Perhaps you’ve had this experience: You see a book on a friend’s bedstand. Even though there is big stack (just like your bedstand at home), that one book jumps out at you. Then a week later someone mentions that same book to you, out of the blue and with no prompting. Another few weeks pass […]
Month: January 2010
Gatz
Jim Fletcher as Jimmy Gatz, AKA Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island Try telling your friends there is this 7 hour, two-part play at the Loeb Theater in Cambridge that consists of nothing but the text from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby. Then try telling them it is one of the most […]
Images With No Handhold
Sam Anderson, book critic for New York Magazine, wrote a great piece called When Lit Blew Into Bits. He spins a cogent narrative about the evolution of literature in the aughts, a time of massively multi-platform, multi-text and content-riddled genres that “seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains […]
Wisdom Teacher
A few remembrances from the inimitable John Cage: “The sound experience I prefer to all others is silence,” he says in this short clip on You Tube. And for most of us on the planet, says Cage, the sound of silence is actually traffic. He rhapsodizes that the sound of traffic is constantly modulating and […]
Keeping it Experimental. And Fun.
(Photo: Horace Ové) It has been several years since Rudy Giuliani catapulted English/African artist Chris Ofili into this country’s art adversarial conversation by trying to have Ofili’s work taken out of public view. It was the elephant dung on the Madonna painting. And of course the magazine images of female genitilia flying about like delicate […]
Throwing up a Curse That Comes Back a Blessing
Umbrella Weather To be drawn out of doors by the first sign of rain on the window, to be happier drenched than dry, to go out in weather that others come in from, warrants a stare from passing faces, and i know what it means: there goes someone with serious problems. Problems I have, and […]
Finding (and Keeping) the Mind of a Child
“My Hands Are My Heart,” by Gabriel Orozco (Photo: Courtesy of the artist) The Gabriel Orozco show at the MOMA has disappointed more critics than it has pleased. Orozco now is, after all, an international jet setter art star (who, as Deborah Sontag pointed out in her review in the New York Times, can afford […]
Sontag on Interpretation
Since posting the quote from the Roiphe review of David Reiff’s memoir of his mother Susan Sontag, Swimming in a Sea of Death, I have been more conscious of the ambient energy that continues to emanate from Sontag’s thoughts and writings. Here’s a sampling: Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded […]
Elizabeth Gilbert, Explained
No question, Elizabeth Gilbert’s follow up to Eat, Pray, Love (which I hated but yes I have to confess, I did stay with it, my nose held tight, til the end), Committed, is the book of the season—the featured review in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday, media tour appearances hither and yon. […]
Forever Susan
Susan Sontag has been a life long beacon for me. Brilliant, articulate, quixotic, complicated, relentless, tenacious, long-suffering, wise—her work and her life have informed so many of my views. In a New York Times review of Sontag’s son David Rieff’s book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Katie Roiphe captured a quicksilver and bittersweet vision […]