The Blue Flower, A.R.T. Tom Stoppard’s last two plays, Coast of Utopia (a 3 play trilogy) and Rock ‘n’ Roll, explore the historical periods preceding significant events as a way of contextualizing and unpacking those outcomes. To make sense of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Stoppard placed his 9 hour Utopia trilogy in the years between […]
Mostly Standing Still
Agnes Martin Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. –Mary Oliver This came to me by way of Jill Fineberg, author of People I Sleep With. It captures the essence IMHO. […]
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Sidestepping the Sequence of Meaningless Events
i’m on the look out for other ways to be with the world since I’ve put myself on a Lenten program of no political reading or discussions. Too bleak. Too close to hopeless. So here’ a bit of advice on “attainable felicity” from the author of our greatest American novel, even after all these years, […]
The Darting Subtlety and Persistent Slowness of the Painter’s Eye
Sean Scully, “Wall of Light Beach” (2001). Oil on canvas. 40”× 50”. Private collection. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art In Robert Hughes’ The Mona Lisa Curse, there is a thoughtful exchange between Hughes and painter Sean Scully. Their brief conversation touches on many of the distinctions I have been writing about here over the […]
Desire is a Craft
“Kama”, a painting that was just recently sold Crispin Sartwell’s small book, Six Names of Beauty, is a personal meditation on a theme that continues to compel and evade comprehension. In that sense it is a literary journey that is refreshingly nonlinear, more rhizomatic than arboreal. Although Sartwell is a devotee of Arthur Danto, his […]
The Magic of Marwencol
Photo from the town of Marwencol by Mark Hogancamp Marwencol is utterly compelling. At some level I want to just leave it at that and tell you to do whatever you can to see this documentary (a schedule of cities and theaters where it is playing in limited release can be seen on the film’s […]
Kieferpalooza
Anselm Kiefer at Gagosian Kiefer pierces my circle of empathy, that field we all carry around us that determines who and what we care about. It is not that our work shares a similar sensibility. Hardly. Kiefer is a legend in his own time, and his art goes grand, epic and high concept as dramatically […]
Journey In
Photomicrograph of different components of the rat cerebellum, including Purkinje neurons in green, glia (non-neuronal cells) in red, and cell nuclei in blue. (Image from Hello I am Here.) Carl Schoonover’s Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century was reviewed in the New York Times on November 29, and […]
Life Happens
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s own, or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life…what one calls one’s real life is a phantom of one’s own imagination. — C. S. Lewis And […]
Abandoning Old Ones Like Musical Notes: Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier Most of us can recognize people who think like us. It’s the ease we have in following arguments, the familiarity in the way someone moves from one idea to the next. Sometimes it is subtle, but when you share your thinking mother tongue with someone, there is comfort in that shared vernacular. Most […]