» Arts
August 04, 2006
Demers on Updike
Charles Demers in Seven Oaks: "Updike's frequent forays into Islamic imagery are hand-held excursions for non-Islamic readers, and as such Ahmad's tutelage under his imam, Shaikh Rashid, reads like Catcher in the Rye crossed with Islam for Dummies."
July 27, 2006
Theatre and Controversy
This Magazine: The Dangers of Playing It Safe
Theatres are flirting with the possibility of irrelevancy, because they are afraid to be relevant and make any decisions that could possibly be construed as controversial--afraid of losing subscribers, of imaginary mobs descending on their auditoriums, of angry columnists lambasting them, of perturbed donors putting their cash elsewhere.... And while producers, directors and playwrights are self-censoring because they worry about rocking the boat, they have failed to notice that it is politely and silently sinking.When the US says that the UN can choose to be "relevant" or pundits say a political party needs to make itself relevant, they mean aligning with powerful interests. In art (according to This, anyway) it's the other way around: it's not relevant if it's not calling cherished (by, I'd add, powerful people and groups) things into question.
July 20, 2006
Clerks II. So scabrous right now.
Some excerpts of reviews of Clerks II:
Justin Chang, Variety.com:
"If Clerks II doesn't have quite the scabrous kick of its predecessor, the chance to revisit a classic premise must have renewed the writer in Smith, whose banter here often achieves a sharpness and quality."
Damon Wise, Empire
"A tender, scabrous and very, very funny comedy that picks up 12 years after the original."
Emanuel Levy:
"What was scabrously funny and charmingly amateurish in the 1994 black-and-white Clerks is now less so on every level in the color bigger-budgeted sequel, an almost unnecessary follow-up to a zeitgeist film that was a personal and aesthetic manifesto."
W, as they say, TF?
July 13, 2006
The Madcap Laughs
It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here
And I'm much obliged to you for making it clear
That I'm not here.
And I never knew we could be so thick
And I never knew we could be so blue
And I'm grateful that you threw away my old shoes
And brought me here instead dressed in red
And I'm wondering who could be writing this song.
I don't care if the sun don't shine
And I don't care if nothing is mine
And I don't care if I'm nervous with you
I'll do my loving in the winter.
And the sea isn't green
And I love the queen
And what exactly is a dream
And what exactly is a joke.
Syd Barrett (1946-2006)
May 22, 2006
The Boss takes on the Boss
An amazing interview with Dave Marsh about Springsteen's new recording of folk songs.
"So every song has its individual, specific history. But the history of all of them, if they've survived for any length of time, is that somebody picks them up and puts themselves into them. It's always particular to the people who are singing them, and it's always a link back to the origins--you're looking backward while you look forward."
March 06, 2006
Plain Crash into Brokeback Mountain
I have yet to see "Crash", but Counterpunch has a contrarian take on it.
Although it is established early on that he is deeply flawed, it is ultimately suggested that his sins are to be forgiven due to his heroics. Because Dillon's character is never held accountable for his repugnance and moreover in the end romanticized, "Crash" does more to uphold the subconscious structures of white supremacy than destroy them.
Along similar lines, there's John Scagliotti's Why Are There No Real Gays in "Brokeback Mountain"?
Gay men in the sixties who were forced to live a straight life knew how to wear the mask of heterosexuality, but once together the mask fell. They were in on each other's secret, and with that secret came language, gestures, a dry, knowing, sometimes gallows sense of humor-subtle things that say, "We're different," because we are. Straight actors, no matter how deeply they believe they can play a role, have no experience of that mask or how to let it drop. They certainly haven't the slightest chance of understanding it in a creative team as robustly heterosexual as this one. It's maybe hard for people to fathom, but casting real straight men in roles that are so clearly in need of real gay men is no different from casting Jimmy Dean in the Sidney Poitier role in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
October 17, 2005
Burning Man: Community for Whitey
Wired News: "'What I've heard said about BM before,' said Steinbock, 'is it's the way that rich white people find community, because people who have undergone any cultural strife automatically develop community out of survival. But here you have a group that's never experienced marginalization, so the only way they can develop community is to spend a bunch of money on this crazy art out in the desert.'"
May 09, 2005
A pretty good rant about Lucas and Star Wars
I hates Lucas! I hates it forever!
Summed up by one of the comments:
It's pretty much become Beverly Hills 9021-Jedi, you'd find a better decent into darkness in an episode of The OC.
March 01, 2005
Arrest at the Cologne New Philharmonic
Guardian: "The raid last week, in which 15 members of the Cologne New Philharmonic were taken into custody, followed allegations that the 49-year-old conductor had been illegally employing musicians from eastern Europe without work permits."
December 22, 2004
Bollywood MP3s
If you have a high speed connection and listen to MP3s, take this opportunity to aquaint yourself with Bollywood music in a systematic way, as the site is likely to get taken down after it gets swamped.
December 14, 2004
Public Mischief
Montréal artist Roadsworth is being charged with 85 counts of "public mischief" for his work, which is being (uncharitably, I'd say) interpreted as vandalism.
Chris at Zeke's Gallery is on the case, with letters, photos of Roadsworth's work, and more.
September 24, 2004
Old Interview with Aaron McGruder
The Washington Post cancelled some Boondocks strips, which led me to look up a few interviews with the cartoonist...
"I think that the audience can generally handle more than the gatekeepers think they can."
Africana.com interview with Aaron McGruder
What I was also telling those kids was that whatever message you want to get across, make sure that you're doing it effectively, and that's the whole point when I say the primary job is being funny. The reason that is, is because if I'm not funny no one pays attention to anything I'm saying. People who are trying to sort of counteract all of this negativity that we all talk about that's in the media can often shoot themselves in the foot by being ineffective communicators, meaning that if you're in the entertainment business and you're trying to get a message across, you have to be entertaining first. Or else, you'll end up like some of these underground rap groups that are "positive," but no one's listening to them. It really requires a sort of sophisticated understanding of how to walk that line between being entertaining and giving your audience what it wants, and then trying to sort of do something to sort of raise awareness at the same time.
July 26, 2004
The Future of Sculpture: Scanned, Digitized, Copied
If you haven't heard about it already, the following article speaks to the existence of three dimensional scanning and carving technologies. Most recently, they've "scanned" Michelangelo's David and in effect "printed" a perfect to scale reproduction.
This technology seems likely to replace skilled craftspeople who were once employed to do such tasks. Although the simple existence of this new tool will not halt the hand made creation of sculpture, I can't imagine how its use won't effect the way we value certain objects, especially considering the average person will likely continue to assume that all marble sculptures are carved by hand, making it possible to sell mechanical reproductions at a great profit, and original work at a loss to most artists. But I suppose technology has largely hijacked craftsmanship in this way already. In any case, it seems likely that new technology will, once again, put massive distance between how we evaluate "good art" today compared to the masterpieces of the past.
read more...February 24, 2004
A Win!
The Board of the National Magazine Awards Foundation has voted to re-instate the poetry category for this year's awards. This comes after much public protest and letter writing (see Dominion's January 13th issue). It is an excellent and gratifying example of policy chages in response to community concerns. Their website is www.magazine-awards.com if you are intreseted in more information or in entering the contest.
February 18, 2004
East Coast Music Awards 2004: Post-Mortem
Sylvia Nickerson, St. John's NL
Now that I’m back in my snug Halifax apartment, far away from the insanity of George Street, the laminated conference badges and the sense of importance about it all, it’s hard to know what conclusion to come to. Did I have a good time? Would I subject myself again to the ECMAs? I’m just not sure.
February 15, 2004
Jesus of Men with Exotic Brooms
Have you ever wondered why Canadian films garner only 4-6 % of Canadian box office revenues? Take out french language productions, and we are down to a shocking 1% of film revenue in OUR OWN COUNTRY.
It isn't for lack of trying. Because Canadian producers and distributors lack the marketing muscle that allows Hollywood blockbusters to dominate theatres, our films seldom stick around long enough to build an audience (when they get into theatres at all).
The First Weekend Club wants to change all this. Members attend showings of Canadian films on their first weekends to help buy such films some extra time in theatres.
February 14, 2004
Random Thoughts from the ECMA's
Sylvia Nickerson, St. John's, NL
It’s a sunny day in St. John’s, and there are slow snowflakes meandering down to earth. On Duckworth and Water streets the telephone polls are plastered with posters advertising the many musical happenings around town in the next two days. There’s way too much to take it all in, so selection is tricky. Hey, I realize it’s Valentine’s Day today. I’d like to give someone a Valentine, but who?
read more...February 13, 2004
Day Zero: A report from this year’s East Coast Music Awards in St. John’s NL
Sylvia Nickerson, St. John's, NL
The ECMAs may be one of many things: 1) Atlantic Canada’s largest music industry awards show featuring this region’s most important schmoozers, handlers, dealers, techies, groupies, reporters and Music Industry Exec, 2) an Awards show that the rest of the world won’t have a chance to forget, because it didn’t know it existed, 3) an opportunity to “check one’s liver at the door” and write it off as a business expense, 4) an event where a gaggle of nervous young musicians might be “discovered”. Who knows. It may be all of the above. I feel for the ECMAs. Any event involving people from so many different rungs on the ladder is bound to involve some kind of mad scramble to the top. Even if that’s not what you’re into, at an event like this, it must be hard to resist the pressure to impress.
February 06, 2004
Life imitates art imitating art imitating life imitating art
"Honestly, listening to this stuff for the first time in, I'd say, 40 years, took me right back to 1966," Levy said. "It was quite amazing, listening to all these old tunes again, for the first time in so long. It was emotional for me. It took you back to a time when there was this idealism that, today, almost appears to be hokey."
National treasure Eugene Levy is nominated for a grammy for A Mighty Wind. And people claim that Americans don't get irony.
February 02, 2004
Fountain at the centre of the world
The NYTimes has a fun review of the novel "The Fountain At the Center of the World":
It's a mucky title for a sublimely frisky novel, one that throws more acid-tipped darts at Nafta and the World Trade Organization than a foot-high stack of Mother Jones and Nation back issues. Newman's book follows three characters (one in London, one in Mexico, one in Costa Rica) in the years leading up to the 1999 W.T.O. protests in Seattle, and it reads like what you'd get if Tom Wolfe clambered inside the head of Noam Chomsky -- it elegantly and angrily scorches a lot of earth. You wouldn't want to read many novels that were as hyper-politicized as this one is, but there's something almost old-fashioned about the way Newman wears his heart utterly on his sleeve.I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if ''The Fountain at the Center of the World'' became the talismanic ''Catch-22'' of the antiglobalization protest movement, the fictional complement to Naomi Klein's influential treatise ''No Logo.'' Expect to see copies of it peeking out of battered rucksacks from Berkeley to Burlington. Though if you are the kind of person who will want to retch at the notion of a novel in which one of the primary characters is named after Daniel Ortega, consider yourself warned.
January 29, 2004
You will not be assimilated
The Corporation is a new film from the makers of Manufacturing Consent. Read their interview with The Tyee:
I can remember crying watching [the Vietnam War documentary film] "Hearts and Minds." When was that? More than thirty years ago? People ducked when the first image of a train was shown in a movie theatre. It's a very powerful medium. But the fact that documentaries are making their way into these entertainment complexes – "The Corporation" is showing in a place called Tinseltown of all things – that's progress!
Inspired? Make your own independent film. Resources are here and here.
January 27, 2004
Mood Indigo
Results for the crucial third quarter of Indigo's fiscal year won't be announced to shareholders till early February but publishers say Indigo — their major customer, accounting for more than half of all books sales in Canada — is sending out gratifyingly large payments.
Is the disarray in Canadian publishing finally over? Publishers are grateful to be getting paid, but still have a lot of eggs in the Indigo basket (via ArtsJournal).
January 24, 2004
Enter the Exiles
France is a less multicultural country than Canada, yet it consistently publishes books in translation from around the world, and from its own exile community. But France famously has no identity crisis and no insecurity about the strength of its home-grown culture.
The plight of immigrant writers in Canada (via Bookslut)
January 05, 2004
Canadian Mines and Violence in Africa
CBC TV aired the show "Human Cargo" tonight, which raised interesting implications between Canadian Mines and violence in Africa. The show follows the stories of two refugee claimants. Part two airs on CBC Monday night at 8:00 pm.
November 13, 2003
Howardina Pindell Response to 'A Serious Lack'
Dear Max,
Thank you for letting me read your article. It is excellent. I wrote a 23 page article about the first Gulf War and no one would publish it. One place told me it was too honest. I also did an anti Gulf War painting that traveled with my traveling show in the early and mid 90's. Some places (Atlanta and Cleveland , Ohio) were really angry at my politics and wanted the show closed down. In one case the director of the gallery was badly harrassed for having my show and one of my political pieces was stolen from the show. I also received harassing phone calls. Political work is not exactly embraced in this country.
However, my current experience in San Francisco was very positive and supportive compared to New York in terms of my politics.
Howardina Pindell
Howardina Pindell is an American political artist and has been active since the 1970's.
(Read Max Liboiron's article, A Serious Lack: American Visual Artists and Imperialism)
67th Govenor General's Awards
The Govenor General's Literary Award for English language fiction has been given to Douglas Glover for his novel Elle. He is a Canadian living in New York State. The Govenor General's Awards are in their 67th year and are now worth $15,000 each.
October 18, 2003
Canadian Actors Establish 'Movie Co-op'
Various movie artists, from Eugene Levy to Paul Gross, Mark McKinney, and George Bloomfield, have established a movie co-op for Canadian movies. The group has modelled itself after United Artists, in hopes of bringing more creative freedom to the film making process.
October 15, 2003
Booker Goes to a Rogue
DBC Pierre has won this years Man Booker Prize for his first novel, Vernon God Little. It is the story of a fifteen year old boy who is accused of a high school massacre. DBC Pierre is a nom de plume which means "Dirty But Clean" Pierre, based on the Australian cartoon character, Dirty Pierre. The author's real name is Peter Finlay. He was born in Australia, grew up in Mexico and now lives in Ireland. The author has a colorful past:
"In his 42 years he has managed to get himself shot by a neighbor
in Mexico City, work up debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars,
cultivate drug and gambling addictions and leave behind a trail of
wronged woman, despite having to have his face reconstructed by
surgeons after a horrific car crash. In between, he has managed
unsuccessful careers as a filmmaker, treasure hunter, smuggler
and graphic artist."
Finlay said the 50,000 pound cheque would go chiefly to the 75-year-old painter, Robert Lenton, who Finlay swindled out of his home.
October 02, 2003
2003 Nobel Prize for Literature
J.M. Coetzee has been awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature. This makes him Africa's third Nobel laureate for literature, after Wole Soyinka of Nigeria in 1986 and Nadine Gordimer of South Africa in 1991. The academy spoke of his "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance." Mr. Coetzee was the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice.
This year's other Nobel prizes will be announced next week.
August 08, 2003
Quebec Moviegoers Act Locally
The The Globe and Mail reports that movies made in Quebec are outpacing Hollywood "blockbusters" at the box office.
What's more, the U.S. blockbusters are rapidly losing momentum at the wicket in Quebec. Terminator 3 has taken in only $37,000 in the province last weekend. But La Grande Séduction, produced by Roger Frappier's Max Films, is still going strong, with a $300,000 take. It could become the summer's top grossing film in Quebec. "The movie has a lot of legs," said Alex Films president Simon Beaudry.Will endless Hollywood mediocrity spawn a global resurgence in highly decent regional filmmaking (Miramax aside)? Would that it were so!
Remarkably, it is not the first time this summer that a local movie has outclassed big-budget Hollywood films at the box office. Gagnon executed a similar coup in May, when he released director Denys Arcand's new film, Les Invasions barbares, a week after X2: X-Men United and a week before The Matrix Reloaded opened. Les Invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) took in about $565,000 in its opening weekend, leaving it virtually tied for first place with X-2.
(On an tangential note, Les Invasions Barbares is really quite a good film.)
August 04, 2003
The Understander
(Review of Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers & Dancers, by Robert Bringhurst [afterword by Peter Sanger]. Kentville, N. S.: Gaspereau Press, 2003.)
I tend to think of printed play-scripts as utilitarian things: as tools for scholars, for actors and directors, not as things one might pick up for pleasure. But Robert Bringhurst's Ursa Major, published by Gaspereau Press, is something different.
August 01, 2003
Shopping Without Branding
"Between 1986 and 1990, I made approximately 8,000 color, Hasselblad images on the streets of Communist Europe. I purposely avoided dramatic moments and newsworthy events. In a cityscape without commercial seduction, banality seemed to signify everything. At first I was interested in simple pedestrian traffic. Later I doggedly documented store windows. These seemed to signify the real difference between East and West. Without the garish ad campaigns of the West, these streets felt more neutral... devoid of trumped up and pumped up urgency."
July 21, 2003
Carol Shields
"Once in a while, walking like this in shadowed woodland at three o' clock on a winter afternoon, or hearing perhaps a particular phrase of music, or approaching a wave of sexual ecstasy, Cruzzi has felt a force so resistant to the power of syntax, description or definition, so savage and primitive in its form, that he has been tempted to shed his long years of language and howl monosyllables of delight and outrage.
"Outrage because these are moments of humility, of dressing down, of rebuke to those, like Cruzzi, who perceive reality through print, the moments when those who are proudly articulate confess their speechlessness. It is as though some enormous noisy motor of which they had not ever been conscious, were suddenly switched off. These moments, and their ability to spring leaks at the edges of language, tend to be exceedingly brief, and Cruzzi has noticed, too, that they are shattered by the least effort to analyse them or extend their duration."
-- Carol Shields, Swann (New York: Viking, 1987)
July 07, 2003
Imagination
Ammiel Alcalay in Al Ahram: Politics and Imagination: After the fall of Baghdad
How are those of us involved in transference and translation to react under such circumstances? Have we perhaps reached a point where NOT translating or providing access to works from the Arab world might be the more legitimate act? Have we all simply become lap dogs, ready to jump at the first opportunity given to peddle our wares as imperial curios? And when we decide to participate, how can we insulate and protect these works from subjugation, from being, literally, eaten alive?
My own sense of this is that, living, as we are, in the heart of the empire, we must discover new ways to both renounce and take up power. The insularity of American intellectual life presents very real political problems and writers have a crucial role to play in disturbing this deadly slumber. By repopulating cultural space with the banished and the obliterated, writers can reassert the absolute value of individual experience in a political context, as a political context, as a road block to be avoided or ignored at one's own peril. But even here, the act of transmission is not innocent and must be permeated with the kind of vigilance that recognises, as the American poet Jack Spicer once put it, that "There are bosses in poetry as well as in the industrial empire."
[...] experts continually tell us that the Arab world has no Solzhenitsyns or Havels. The facts, unfortunately, get very much in the way of such a patently misleading assertion but these facts are not at all that easy to get a hold of. The number of writers, intellectuals, and political activists in the Arab, Middle Eastern and Islamic world who have been censored, imprisoned, tortured, assassinated or disappeared constitutes one of the great human sagas of our times, but there is no single place to go and find this narrative. How did we get to this point? How have the real issues at stake in the contemporary Middle East been made invisible to the North American public? There is, of course, the usual villain, in the form of the media machine. But there is, as well, a massive failure and acquiescence on the part of American intellectuals, a true lack not just of responsibility but of response, on the human, creative, historical and political levels. As the US government and media prepare us to accept more and more perverse acts carried out in our names, the need to systematically excavate and represent this human archaeology is absolute and essential, and should be placed in the realm of public health. While those involved in cultural transmission and translation always face the risk of appropriating, trivialising or displacing a work from an environment of crucial importance to one of potential indifference, the risks of not doing such work, it seems to me, are far greater. Inaction, indifference and the lack of solidarity or even curiosity marks something much more ominous -- it marks the presence of a picket line that we have internalised and constructed in our very imagination, and that we either fear crossing or forget even exists.
July 06, 2003
Strange Bedfellows
In the last issue of The Dominion, arts columnist Matt Brennan quoted George W. Bush's comment that rapper Eminem is 'the most dangerous threat to American children since polio'. Recently, the BBC reported that Irish poet - and Nobel Prize laureate - Seamus Heaney has praised Eminem, saying that he has 'sent a voltage around a generation', and that he has 'done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy.'
I wonder what George Bush would have to say about Seamus Heaney.
June 04, 2003
Ideas, Not Money
The founders of the ReLit Awards ('Re' for 'Regarding Literature, Reinventing Literature and Relighting Literature ... ') have just announced this year's shortlisted titles. The awards sport the motto 'Ideas, Not Money', and were founded in 2000 'as an alternative to the big-money prizes'. The competition is open to books published by independent Canadian literary publishers. There is no entry fee, and there are no cash prizes; the winners 'will be trumpeted at bonfire beach parties in Newfoundland and British Columbia' on June 21.
In an essay published in the Winter 2001 issue of The New Quarterly, John Metcalf writes: 'The literary world has been undergoing rapid changes over the last few years. It has become ever more shallow. As Steven Heighton said to me recently: "Literature used to be about literature. Now it's about money."'
Will the ReLit awards prove antidotal?
Each of the winners will receive a 'specially-designed ring by Newfoundland goldsmith Christopher Kearney'. Each sterling silver ring is set with `four moveable dials, each stamped with the entire alphabet, that can be revolved to fashion four-letter words.' (The ReLit press release does not, of course, specify which four-letter words.)
May 31, 2003
Poetry
From Swann A Literary Mystery, by Carol Shields (Toronto: General, 1989):
It had always seemed something of a miracle to him that poetry occasionally did speak. Even when it didn't he felt himself grow reverent before the quaint, queer magnitude of the poet's intent. When he thought of the revolution of planets, the emergence of species, the balance of mathematics, he could not see that any of these was more amazing than the impertinent human wish to reach into the sea of common language and extract from it the rich dark beautiful words that could be arranged in such a way that the unsayable might be said.
May 21, 2003
Breaking up in the information age
“Technology brings us closer”—conventional advertising wisdom, and it sells long distance plans, but breaking up in the information age is sadder than it needs to be.I have a girlfriend number on my phone's speed dial, embossed with a B from four years ago, then scratched out and replaced with a C three years ago, and replaced with a M less than a year ago. The phone is complicated and I don't remember how to un-program it. Every time something ends, the most recent letter sits there with the ghosts of the other letters below it, inviting a finger-slip, until some night when I sit down in front of the phone and figure out its rules.
May 18, 2003
Not to Be
In an article entitled "Blurble, Blurble, Blurble" (The New Quarterly, 20.2), John Vardon writes:
"As an editor of The New York Times Book Review for many years, Randolph Hogan became quite familiar with the stock phrases used in publishing and reviewing. In a satirical article called 'Be a Literary Critic. Earn Big Bucks,' he offered would-be reviewers a list of adverb/adjective/noun combinations that would guarantee a quotation on the dust jacket or back cover of the book in questions. So, by simply choosing a word from columns A, B, and C, reviewers can not only gain a reputation as a literary critic but also convey the impression that they have actually read the whole book. In this way, a novel that a reviewer likes would become a 'devastatingly original tour de force,' a 'superbly engrossing indictment' or an 'absorbingly luminous examination' whereas a novel a reviewer doesn't care for could be called a 'regrettable turgid melodrama,' a 'ploddingly stilted potboiler' or a 'tediously pedestrian soap opera.'''
To Be
In the weeks leading up to the publication of the first issue of The Dominion, I went about asking various artist-friends about their thoughts on newspaper arts coverage in Canada. In a letter to Dru Jay, I wrote:
I think that the arts have perhaps suffered disproportionately from the "expectations of multiple stories per day, low pay, and profit-hogging" that you speak of. In an essay entitled "Fredericton and Fatherhood", published in the fall, 2000 issue of Fiddlehead magazine, Eric Miller writes:
"The love of speed is perhaps characteristic of those who have not experienced death and birth -- or who have strained themselves to keep those experiences at a distance even when death and birth have grazed them closely. Grief is slow and growth is slow and many kinds of love are slow; our lives have less endurance than what they seem to subordinate, and betray a disproportion to the gradualness of our deepest insights. Leontes in The Winter’s Tale took sixteen years to appreciate his error, to merit its qualified rectification. Our mistakes rival our longevity, and the realization of our gratitude often takes as long."
I would add to Miller's list. Grief is slow and growth is slow and many kinds of love are slow. And art tends to be slow, as well. Not that it can't happen in a lightning flash, but the charged particles that give rise to the flash build up in clouds that are centuries old.
The challenge in creating a great arts section in the Dominion would have to do, in part, I think, with reconciling this necessary slowness with the necessary speed of a publication that purports to be a newspaper -- after all, we have magazines and books of all varieties to grapple with things at length.
But it's a challenge that interests me.
I sent a copy of this note to GaRRy Williams, an actor, director, and theatrical-thinker, currently working in the Canadian maritimes. He wrote:
Your thoughts about slowness resonate with my own; they also remind me of Bruce Chatwin's fascination with the pedestrian activity as one conducive to thought, health and humanity; the nomadic lifestyle as somehow utopian (see Siddharta, Jesus, Gandhi etc.). Art is about movement, but certainly not on high-powered speed boats of hyper-jets.read more...