Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) (Production Photos: A.R.T.) Suzan-Lori Parks, playwright, Pulitzer prize winner, MacArthur genius fellow, talks about her writing in a manner that resonates deeply with me. She openly speaks about how she lets the spirit inspire her. (A Sanskrit tattoo on her arm reminds her to […]
- Aesthetics
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The Disability of Visibility
Ken Price at work (Photo: LACMA) I am especially fond of an essay written some time ago by William Deresiewicz (author of the recently released Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life) that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Learning titled The End of Solitude. Deresiewicz traces […]
- Aesthetics
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Jake Berthot, Fellow Traveler
Jake Berthot in 1995. Photo: John Berthot I know several people who knew Jake Berthot personally. I was not so lucky. But a fan of his work I have been for a long time, and I was deeply saddened to read of his death on December 30. He was 75. Over the years, reading or […]
- Art Making
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To Ponder and To Leap
Engraving depicting Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, circa 1650. Photograph: Kean Collection/Getty Images. Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was an English aristocrat, poet, essayist, playwright and scientist. At a time when most women writers were publishing anonymously, Cavendish published under her own name. She wrote about gender, power, manners, scientific method, and philosophy. Her book, “The […]
- Antiquities
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Outside the Line of Time
Passageway in Jerusalem I just returned from journeying eastward. We spent our first week in Israel for a wedding (mazel tov, Idan and Shelly) and then to Rome for a crash course in all things Roman thanks to our favorite art historians, daughter Kellin and her husband Sean. Roman ingenuity and technological prowess are staggering […]
- Contemplative
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Prioritize, Prioritize
My granddaughter Siena tangled up (joyously) in lights A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together. — Garrison Keillor Compulsory is a good word for this time of year. So is paradoxical. While the holiday percussiveness is pervasive, I still keep looking for some […]
Pale Ramon
One of the phases of the moon from Selenographia, world’s first lunar atlas completed by German-Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in 1647 after years of obsessive observations. Hevelius also created history’s first true moon map. Courtesy of the Wolbach Library, Harvard Plate from Thomas Wright’s 1750 treatise ‘An Original Theory,’ depicting Wright’s trailblazing notion that the […]
- Aesthetics
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Attentionality
Looking closely at a recent painting Robert Hass begins his extraordinary collection, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, talking about the photography of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams: What the two artists have in common, besides a name, is a certain technical authority. The source of that authority is […]
- Art Making
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Young and Yet Wise: Weil and Hesse
Simone Weil Eva Hesse The writer Simone Weil died in 1943 at the age of 34. In spite of her short life, her legacy is a rich one, spanning a variety of métiers including philosophy, Christianity, theology, social justice, mysticism. And even though her life’s work was from her point of view of a god-centered […]
Finding a Current
View of the shoreline of the Great Salt Lake One of my favorite stories was told by Laurie Anderson about an interview she conducted with John Cage for the Buddhist publication Tricycle many years ago. A great admirer of Cage, Anderson was desperate to ask him the really BIG question: Are things getting worse or […]