The inimitable Thomas Derrah plays Mark Rothko in the Speakeasy’s New England premiere of Red, by John Logan. The play runs through February 4th. In John Logan’s Tony award-winning play Red, Mark Rothko delivers a steady stream of tough love lessons on the meaning of art to his young studio assistant. Advice is rarely this […]
Wisdom
- Aesthetics
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Martian Muse and Richard Tuttle
Carbon Dioxide Ice in the Late Summer Fan and Dust Devil in Deuteronilus Mensa Jumbled Terrain in Ius Chasma There are mornings when language just isn’t of service to what is happening in the interior landscape. So it is ironic that in the language-centric world that is most online environments, the “out of language” still […]
Many Hands and Feet
A Map to the Next World In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky. My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens. For the soul […]
- History
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Licking Life
As unpleasant as air travel has become, it still serves up that delicious, “put your headphones on and block out the world” slot of time to just read. This weekend it was spent devouring Sarah Bakewell’s captivating and award winning book, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at […]
Accounting for Happiness
My friend and fellow blogger Sally Reed (and the writer behind Butter and Lightning) recently posted a very moving message about grief, suffering and loss. I hope you will take a moment to visit her site and read it in its entirety. In her most recent post she included an exquisite poem by Jane Kenyon […]
- Philosophy
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Sidestepping the Sequence of Meaningless Events
i’m on the look out for other ways to be with the world since I’ve put myself on a Lenten program of no political reading or discussions. Too bleak. Too close to hopeless. So here’ a bit of advice on “attainable felicity” from the author of our greatest American novel, even after all these years, […]
What’s Too Small
Evenesse 2, 25 x 55″ Sweet Darkness You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive […]
A Worldwide Eschatological Whoopjamboreehoo…or Not
I have a restlessness that constantly moves between two extreme nodes—from the “language is useful” end of the spectrum to the “language is not useful” at the other. When you find yourself hovering closer to the latter, the chatty wisdom of someone like Tom Robbins can feel comforting. Here’s one from my ever-reliable wisdom source, […]
- Aesthetics
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Lifelong Construction
] Random dust patterned on a surface in my studio _______ I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, […]
The Either/Or and the Both/And
Every one of us loves our own story. We are all attached, consciously or unconsciously, to our very personal version of truth, our take on who is right, our convictions about what makes sense, our determinations about how one should live in the world. Certainly the fallacies in our thinking that blindside us about ourselves […]