Birds Do It, Bees Do It

Isabella Rossellini as a spider This is just too entertaining to pass up: Isabella Rossellini has gone public with her ongoing fascination regarding the sex life of insects. Put together as a series of shorts called Green Porno, the project features the beautiful Isabella herself playing a variety of insects in their mating glory. My […]

A Longing from Deep in The Bones

Ever since it was first published in 1998, Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics, edited by Bill Beckley with David Shapiro has been my primary text. This collection of essays brings together the thinking of artists and critics on the greatly misunderstood (and much maligned) topic of beauty. Uncontrollable Beauty embodies many of the reasons […]

Wired for Sound

It is an easy seduction for an artist–any artist–to complain about being misunderstood and unappreciated. But according to Oliver Sachs (by way of Trevor Hunter’s excellent blog, New Music Box,) musicians may have a neurological right to that claim: At last week’s Chamber Music America conference, keynote speaker Oliver Sacks brought up an astonishing fact: […]