Note to readers: This is the first in a series of blogs I am delighted to be writing for Harmony: The WomenArts Partnership Project. They will appear biweekly on the WomenArts site, and I will also reproduce each one here. Welcome to the first installment of The Harmony Project blog! Harmony: The WomenArts Partnership Project …
I have taken a poll of my friends, and the results are in: no one who actually knows me finds me intimidating. In fact, it seems I have a reputation for putting people at ease in conversation. I felt the need to conduct this research this because I have been getting some strange results in …
I was thrilled to see a new film on one of my heroes (and I am a woman of few heroes, it must be admitted), the great writer and thinker Paul Goodman, who died in 1972. Watching Jonathan Lee’s Paul Goodman Changed My Life was like spending an hour and half in the company of …
Gender is not a two-party system, that much is clear. As with almost all such categories, you find more variation within groups than between them. Some men like football and guns, while others are into cooking and fashion—and the same goes for women. No matter how you parse it, gender is a clock rather than …
Gil Scott-Heron died on Friday, and that is a sad, sad sentence to write. If you are familiar with his music, then you know what I’m talking about; and if you’re not, you can begin to remedy that by following the links in this essay. (Listen to the beautiful “Rivers of My Fathers” from 1974’s …
The world didn’t end yesterday (unless the next world includes a bus from New York to Philadelphia equipped with the electrical outlets and wifi that enabled me to write this essay). Yes, I’ve been on the road all spring, a condition that tends to impair my ability to focus on a single topic long enough …
I’m watching the Death-of-Bin-Laden blogs unfurl, and my mind keeps wandering away from them. Instant reactions to the news drop like petals from a dying flower as new information emerges: was Bin Laden armed? Was torture used to find his whereabouts? The whole process seems designed to calibrate some precise reading of responsibility and righteousness, …
Lately, whenever I speak, I’ve been handing out small cards bearing two optical illusions. Last night, I handed them out at dinner. My friends hosted a lovely evening of teachings devoted to Passover’s theme of liberation. When I thought about what I wanted to share, these images came immediately to mind. Gaze at the image …
Note: I’m also blogging this week as part of Cultural Policy 101: A Blog Salon sponsored by Emerging Arts Professionals/SFBA. Join the conversation, and if you’re planning to be in the Bay Area on Saturday, April 16th, register for my free workshop “Advocating for the Public Interest in Culture” at the Oakland Museum, also sponsored …
I’ve been on the road for speaking engagements, the proximate cause of my recent blog pause. I tend to write here when something worth sharing crystallizes in my mind. But travels notwithstanding, the truth is that just lately, it’s been hard to find the crystals in the fog of reactivity. My subjects today are how …