Top: Hong Kong; Bottom: Chimayo New Mexico I am on the road for a few weeks, first in Hong Kong and then to Santa Fe for the opening of my show at Zane Bennett Gallery on February 25. I will return to Slow Muse on March 2.
Month: February 2011
A Landscape of One’s Own
The landscape in Carson, New Mexico Landscape And Soul Though we should not speak about the soul, that is, about things we don’t know, I’m sure mine sleeps the day long, waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake, preferably by joy, but sadness also comes by surprise, and the soul sings its songs. And because […]
- Aesthetics
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Slow Looking, Boredom and Contemporary Art
Frank Auerbach, Reclining Head of Gerda Boehm, private collection Over the fall months James Elkins, the prodigiously prolific writer about art, art history, criticism and art appreciation, wrote a series of pieces for the Huffington Post. (I wrote about his series here.) One of those articles as a title—Are Artists Bored By Their Work?—that is […]
Maureen Doallas: Neruda’s Memoirs
Ode to Compassion When you are old, re-spin me your beginnings from their Greek and Irish coordinates, unplot straight lines of ancient made-up histories, upend the stakes of claims in bindings of your mother’s mother’s mother’s womb cut and spilling life into care. When you are grey, recall me to the look of the father […]
Forms Change
Robert Plant I call it “squinting”—you will have your own term. You’ve chosen a favorite musician, probably in your teen years, and the relationship grows through awkward phases…Along the way, you find yourself squinting to keep seeing what made you fall in love…In pop music, which is a worse deal for the aging than painting […]
Bucky for the Ages
R. Buckminster Fuller Content-rich theater is hard to do. Tom Stoppard is probably our most exemplary contemporary playwright of that genre. In so many of his plays, ideas and intellectual constructs take on theatrical forms, functioning almost as characters in the story. The Stoppard experience is deeply layered and yet neither didactic nor instructional. Which […]
Memoiramania
Memoirist extraordinaire Mary Karr (Photo: Todd Plitt, USA TODAY) TMI. It’s like drinking: Some can handle a lot, and some are flattened after just one glass. Meanwhile we are living in an age of rampant confessionalism, memoiring gone viral, with more blogs than there are humans and way too much information being flung at us […]