I think it’s particularly worrying at the moment because you can only create in an atmosphere of freedom, where you’re not checking everything you say critically before you move on. What you have to be able to do is to build without knowing where you’re going because you’ve never been there before. That’s what creativity […]
Nevertheless She Persisted, recycled denim and clothing labels By Michèle Fandel Bonner . . Oceans I have a feeling that my boathas struck, down there in the depths,against a great thing. And nothinghappens! Nothing…Silence…Waves… –Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,and are we standing now, […]
Ah Prospero. You are my favorite character in all of Shakespeare! The masterful conjurings, the lonely exile, the fierce revenge still raging after twelve years away from the lost Dukedom of Milan, the Other embodied in ethereality and earthiness, the willingness in the end to forgive and forego—there are so many parts of his story […]
The light in San Francisco in January can be incomprehensibly warm and golden. My winter-lashed New England self was basking in its late afternoon glow as I sat with a friend in a lush Marina garden. Bliss. Then, in an instant, my eyesight went skiwampus. That was 2018. After a lot of medical head scratching, […]
Some proclivities are sui generis, perennially present as a life unfolds. That is the sense I get when George Saunders expresses the discomfort he still feels about his childhood failure to befriend a lonely girl in his neighborhood. For Saunders, gifted author and teacher, kindness and humility are built in. I have a primordial proclivity […]
Art’s political power derives…from having no pragmatic application. It can’t fix the world…It stands for itself, it confronts our imagination and our intellect, and so it shapes our capacities as free citizens…If I seek out art in a time of national catastrophe…it’s because I need to be reminded what to live for. Jason Farago, art […]
Note: A few weeks ago I gave a guest lecture for the MFA students at Long Island University Post. At the time I referred to my remarks as a “shop talk:” gathering with fellow tradespeople to share some work wisdom. Art making can resemble a kind of guild after all, one that adheres to the […]
Six years ago I read Charles Eisenstein’s book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. I was immediately caught in its spell. I described it to friends as a book that will fundamentally change the way you see the world. I know I am particularly susceptible to books. New ideas are the most […]
Perhaps it is my reduced engagement with the flow of life as we knew it that has made it easy to ponder what we should be fighting to preserve, post COVID, and what we would be better off shedding. As the wiser advisors across the world have made clear, there is no returning to the […]
No matter the circumstances of a life–whether being lived indoors under quarantine or in that effortlessly privileged expansiveness of our world before it closed—the mind is on. It is relentlessly weaving a slew of meanings, patterns, stories. Some days it feels slow and heavy, overwhelmed by the hyperobjectival complexity of considering a common future, one […]