Slow Grow Beauty
When you are concerned with aesthetics, with images of beauty, you are always exploring. You’re always remaking them, adding to them. They are basically slow-growing things, like plants, and the...
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The Human Touch
That’s what painting is on a physical level: brush hitting canvas. It’s been going on for a long time because the way it links perception with action intersects with something elemental about humans. —...
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Dancing About Architecture
Balanchine often likened choreography to carpentry, a task executed with diligence and precision. The point where technique meets an internal drive or intention represents, on the ballet stage,...
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Public Hearing
The connections of the ear with vital and outgoing thought and emotion are immensely closer and more varied than those of the eye. Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator. — John Dewey, The...
View ArticleThickness of Life
[Writing] history is not to smooth the architecture formed by a set of data to which historians claim to confer coherence and meaning. On the opposite, it is to give the highest importance to the...
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The Singer From the Song
A song is a role. The singer acts a part…all good artists study a song and live with it before performing it…. There is something authentic about any person’s way of giving a song which has been...
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Folk Music Show Business
I’m in the show business now. I’m not in the folk-music business. That’s where it’s at. So is Roscoe Holcomb, Jean Ritchie, Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, all the way up to President Johnson. — Bob...
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Movement Is the Same Yet Different
Movement is so much a part of our daily experience that we don’t even think of it as a thing. We don’t even think of it, we just sort of do it. But if you thought about it, say, how do you walk? I...
View ArticleConquering Space in the Sixties
The 1960s was all about the conquest of space, outer and inner, astronauts, acid trips, social revolt, one long strange return of the repressed trip… — Greg Tate, “Why the Hell Ornette Went All Up In...
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An Endless Quest for Questions
why ornette coleman matters. Ornette’s idea of freedom has social implications for a society and a citizenry less and less inclined or able to hear their own muse, sing their own song, and collaborate...
View ArticleSkin In the Game
Skin is the best source for the image, because it works in all directions at once. If we could turn the skin off, we would appreciate it much more. But the skin works most of the time on automatic...
View ArticleA Critical Perspective
Critics are poets cut down, says someone—by way of jeer; but, in truth, they are men with the poetical temperament to apprehend, with the philosophical tendency to investigate. — Margaret Fuller
View ArticleMusic Can (Almost) Change the World
dialogue between lou reed & václav havel. “You obviously feel and prove that music can change the world?,” Lou Reed. “Not in itself, it’s not sufficient in itself. But it can contribute to that...
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Knock on Wood(stock)
There’s a history of American ascendancy that might be written in terms of luck and timing, guile and opportunity. …There’s the past, and there’s the story we tell about it. Those who benefitted from...
View ArticleIt’s a Happening!
…class itself is not a thing, it is a happening. — EP Thompson, 1968 Postscript to The Making of the English Working Class (h/t Gabriel Winant) The United States is a country of sophisticated...
View ArticleEveryone’s a Historian
criticism is history. Literature is the fair flower of culture, but underneath culture are the deeper strata of philosophy, theology, law, statecraft—of ideology and institutionalism—resting finally...
View ArticleThat’s Sick
claire bishop on works of art. Works of art are less important as unique entities of individual expression (that model died years ago) than as symptoms of—and at best, commentators on—patterns of...
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Autocuonstrucción
This project, like the house, the books I read, the music I listened to, the films I watched, all those experiences that crisscross the definitively unfinished construction of identity—of a house, I...
View ArticleEnshrined
hg wells on the us constitution. America is pure eighteenth century. They took the economic conventions that were modern and progressive at the end of the eighteenth century and stamped them into the...
View ArticleThickness of Life
aby warburg on history writing. [Writing] history is not to smooth the architecture formed by a set of data to which historians claim to confer coherence and meaning. On the opposite, it is to give...
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