It’s interesting to have opportunities to give advice to young artists. Each time, I learn something about myself, something about the way I may appear in others’ eyes—and something about the gap between them too. I suppose the easiest way to explain that gap is that to those several decades my junior, my life—or at …
My sweetheart loves to fly fish. He never keeps the fish, just tenderly tips them back into the sea. So he’s plugged into various fishing networks, some devoted to survival of species that are imperiled by human impact. He’s the one who turned me onto Twyla Roscovich’s quite remarkable film, Salmon Confidential. The film painstakingly …
In New York for my book launch, I did some of the things I usually do: walked the streets endlessly on my way from one meeting to another, connected with old friends, wondered what exactly it says about “civilization” that we are increasingly expected to get along without public restrooms…. I walked crosstown from NYU …
(This post is a part of the Artistic Innovation blog salon curated by Caridad Svich for the 2013 TCG National Conference: Learn Do Teach in Dallas). “When I use a word,’Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” (Lewis G. Carroll, Through The …
Dear Readers: I’d love to see you at my upcoming book launches in New York at 6 pm on Thursday, 23 May and Berkeley at 2 pm on Sunday, 2 June. What comes to mind when I write that someone has used words as blunt instruments? Insults or arguments maybe, the kind of hate-speech that …
It’s been one of those times when the pace of events—both interior and exterior—accelerates almost beyond reckoning. Granted, these days I get much of my news from “The Daily Show,” but still: Inauguration! Republican vote-rigging! Somalia! Egypt! I had a birthday with all the attendant thrill and agony, met a bunch of deadlines, and—big news …
“No matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up.” (Lily Tomlin) I have a friend who talks about “the default world.” He means the one in which we adjust to absurdity, tolerating behavior that we ought to rebuke, simply because in that diminished reality it has become normalized. In the default world, U.S. elections …
Have you got it yet? The Surreal Season Headache-and-a-Half? I start to feel my SSHH! when the presidential election campaigns ramps up during the summer before the election, and the pounding doesn’t usually stop till November at the earliest. It’s an overdose of surrealism, plain and simple: while this over-the-top waste of time and money …
If the question had been put outright, my friend and I agreed, a supermajority would have voted on our side: Do you want to live in a nation where a few ultra-rich individuals own as much as everyone else put together, have carte blanche to use their wealth to shape public policy, yet feel completely …
We need a new rallying cry. Van Jones has an idea that’s not quite cooked, but suggestive. On Saturday, someone who heard Jones address a Scott Walker recall rally in Wisconsin tweeted this quote from Jones’ remarks: “Don’t adapt to absurdity.” He was making the point that over time, even what seems preposterous becomes normalized. …