Have you noticed? Money changes everything. Almost daily, I get into conversations about compensation and fairness. Sometimes I even start them. But whoever starts them, by the time they get going, there’s always so much gray area that I have trouble finding my way to daylight. I’m interested to know what you think. Let me …
An enduring pattern has been inscribed on the struggle for cultural equity in this country. Those who get the biggest share of funding—them that’s got, as Billie Holiday put it—pay lip-service to fairness for those who get crumbs—them that’s not. But lip-service is generally the only currency they are willing to shell out. The haves …
Did you ever have something that generated feelings of pride and shame simultaneously, depending on your viewpoint? Something you wanted to share but also wanted to hold close? Something good you didn’t trust to others? I remember a friend who grew up in a northern California Pomo family telling me that her grandmother instructed her …
I am slow to anger, but it really pisses me off when people prescribe for others some purportedly virtuous (or at least dutiful) behavior they’d never embrace in their own lives. In the financial sector, they call it “skin in the game.” Have you risked some of your own money on the advice you are …
Before dinner last night, my husband thought the asparagus I was preparing to grill were too wet, that the baste wouldn’t stick. I doubted it, but I dried them off. He then proceeded to add explanations and persuasions to his case for dryness. “Sometimes I think you’re a sore winner,” I told him. “It’s not …
This has been a strange time in my little world: I’ve been traveling for work while my computer stayed home and lost its mind. I’m glad to say that sanity (i.e., memory, software, and general order) has been restored, and while I still have the sort of compulsive desire to tell the tale that afflicts …
For a year and a half or so, I’ve been an advisor to a new and exciting project, the US Department of Arts and Culture, which is demonstrating the public cultural presence we need in this country by performing it. Watch Deputy Secretary Norman Beckett explain it in a video clip. My role is Chief …
In her concluding keynote for Staging Sustainability 2014, Adrienne Goehler exhorted conference attendees to support a “basic income grant” as a universal right. She put it succinctly: the current system forces overproduction in all realms, even art. The current system of grants for artists, inadequate in so many other ways, operates almost exclusively on a …
In my keynote for Staging Sustainability 2014, I was asked to define “sustainability.” “The implicit meaning of the term refers to its opposite,” I told the group. “We fear having damaged ecosystems so much that life on Earth will soon be unsustainable, so sustainability names our search for whatever can heal that damage and allow …
I used to love the original “Star Trek,” each episode a short course in cultural anthropology. The Enterprise traipsed through outer space, often stumbling across civilizations running on a distorted operating system that oppressed some inhabitants to benefit others. The distortions being colorfully different from our own, they were easy to spot. For instance, one …