The Way It Is There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or […]
Theater
Hay Tiempo
Graciela Iturbide was a young mother when she lost her six year old daughter. It was shortly after that tragic loss that she turned to photography, eventually studying with Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Mexico’s most famous photographer. Bravo took her under his wing. His work was determinedly not picturesque, political or stereotypical, common fare in mid-20th […]
Dragons, Dalmatians and Dancing Gorillas
Hilma af Klint, from A Work on Flowers, Mosses and Lichen (© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk/Photo: Moderna Museet, Albin Dahlström) And while great achievement is rare and difficult at best, it is still rarer and more difficult if, while you work, you must at the same time wrestle with inner demons of self-doubt and […]
The Smudgy Fingerprints of our Humanness
“Uprooting the Tree of Life” by Ford Doolittle (From the February 2000 issue of Scientific American.) Science itself, however precise and objective, is a human activity. It’s a way of wondering as well as a way of knowing. It’s a process, not a body of facts or laws. Like music, like poetry, like baseball, like […]
A Timely Romeo and Juliet
Cast of “Romeo and Juliet,” at the Huntington Theater (Photo: Huntington Theater) “Theater is the essential art form of democracy,” claims Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater in New York. A new idea that power should stem from the consent of the governed—flowing from below to above—was born in Athens in the 6th […]
Endlings
Celine Song (Photo: Courtesy of the artist) A few years ago I was rhapsodizing with a friend about how much I love powerful storytelling, the kind that takes you so fully into another reality. Was the topic W. G. Sebald, George R. R. Martin, Rachel Cusk? I can’t remember what launched me, but the response […]
The Many Faces of Othello
Ira Aldridge playing Othello in the 19th century, from a painting by James Northcote Humans have a built-in pattern detection facility that is a key method for making sense of things. Making sense is, after all, an essential survival skill. Barraged daily by a firehose of sensory data, we have to employ some means of […]
Bad and Better, Both
Henrik Ibsen Humans are not particularly good at assessing large patterns. We can make smaller calls, like noticing that our train is late or determining that an apple is particularly delicious. But assessing transportation infrastructure efficiency or the overall quality of food production? It is like the difference between weather and climate: there is that […]
Storytelling in Dark Times
Richard III, now on the Boston Common (All photos: Commonwealth Shakespeare Company) Storytelling fascinates me. It is considered primal to the human condition. My guess is that you, like me, are soothed—and intrigued—when you hear the words, “Let me tell you a story.” Because I am not a particularly good storyteller—my preferred form of personal […]
Warhol and Capote: From the Archives
WARHOLCAPOTE, at American Repertory Theater, Cambridge MA (Photo: Gretjen Helene) In the early 1990s, Anna Deveare Smith created a new kind of “documentary theatre” based on the language that came from taped interviews with everyday people. Fires in the Mirror was about the 1991 Crown Heights riot, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 dealt with the […]