Be forewarned: if you don’t feel like a rant today, save this for later. For the last few days I’ve had the strangest sensation. It’s as if I’ve been struggling to emerge from some intensely sticky substance—a vat of rubber cement, perhaps, or a freshly spun spider web as it might appear to a hapless [...]
“Life is a mistake that only art can correct.”
Stew, Passing Strange
I discovered this week that I have become a member of a religion I used to reject: the Church of Art. (I’m guessing you clocked this before I did.)
I discovered it during the swooning spiritual experience of watching the DVD of Passing Strange, the uniquely [...]
When I was a kid, Thanksgiving meant tracing your spread-out fingers on construction paper to make a colorful turkey cut-out, and listening to prepackaged accounts of harmony among the early European settlers and the Native Americans who took pity on them, teaching them to grow corn, hunt deer and catch fish. At home, we cooked [...]
I’ve begun to see our perceptual capacities as a kind of funhouse (only not always so much fun). Our paths to clear sight are blocked here by obstacles, there by distorting mirrors. It’s easiest to spot the places a fellow-traveler has been tricked into thinking a mirror is a window; and hardest when we find [...]
After three months of accepting the boundless hospitality of lovely friends, I am moving into a new apartment, less than a mile along my beloved Bay walk from the house in Richmond where I wrote so many of the essays posted to my blog since 2004.
Most of my possessions won’t arrive for a couple of [...]
It’s hard not to have an ambivalent relationship with political power, no matter how modest. There’s some truth to the notion that the people who most crave it are least reliable when they have it; but no more truth than there is to the idea that those who are negatively oriented to power will never [...]
I wish so many people didn’t hate the phrase “paradigm shift,” because it really does the job of conveying one highly specific thought: that an old model of how things work is receding at the approach of a new and more powerful model (in the words of Ken Wilber, one that “subsumes and transcends” the [...]
What is the extent of our capacity for imaginative empathy? When is it easy to put oneself in the place of other, and when is the stretch too far to manage?
I don’t have much trouble imagining how Henry Louis Gates felt earlier this week when he was arrested at the door of his own home.
I [...]
This is the first section of a talk I gave on 19 June 2009 at the National Summit of Ensemble Theaters, meeting at the University of San Francisco. Click here to download the full text.
I’ve just moved back to California, part of a big life-change for me. Whenever I come here, I touch down with [...]
I grew up in a house without many books. Each volume in the single short bookcase my family owned stands out in memory, I suppose because each one had to be singular in some way to earn its place, something like a cabinet of curiosities. By the time I left home at 17, the bookcase [...]
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