Memories fade. They begin vividly and then start to decay. And worse than decay, they start to deform. Until they are no longer very reliable. Valuable perhaps but not reliable. And then they vanish altogether. That’s one good way to think about memory.
Another way to think about it. We store our memories [...]
She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine . [...]
Gossamer has lost weight since its robust Middle English youth. These days we think of gossamer as light, airy, elusive, delicate, evanescent. Yet in its original form it was a simple compound of the terms for goose and summer. A sturdy word, with physical impact. The squawk and peck and heft of a barnyard [...]
One of our very favorite art critics, Jerry Saltz, looks on the bright side of the Impending Economic Turmoil. No, it’s not the part where 40 New York galleries close, an art magazine folds and a major art fair collapses. It has more to do with taking the commercial out of art.
What, only a [...]
The last couple weeks in the political season anything said on behalf of a candidate is artful lie; anything about the opposition is out-and-out lie. The crude lesson of Modernism is that we are, one and all, unreliable narrators slouching toward the polls bearing a fragmented, mythologized tale. It is a commonplace that hagiography, of [...]
OK, you know I’ve been moaning about this election and the Death of Democracy, ad nauseum. But it’s a sunny October Saturday, and courtesy of my brother-in-law, a little hope just blew in, a reminder really, in the form of Leonard Cohen’s Democracy. Now, I can’t embed this video for you (I’m just [...]
As the intrepid Mr. Mead has reminded me, a lot of cool-sounding stuff is pounding the boards of Portland’s performance spaces right now:
Bucky Fuller, Adam Bock, Dead Funny, Guys and Dolls, and despite the mixed reviews I’d like to see Artists Rep’s Speech and Debate — there has to be a reason it was [...]
Some precincts of Art Scatter have been ill. Not desperately ill, not hardly. But sick enough to stay home and do battle with cold germs that are tougher than Scatter is. We are not looking for sympathy, though, not for the interminable snuffling and sniffing and, um, draining, because we know that’s just part [...]
Hold the fort. Hold the matches. No book burnings in Halsey, after all.
Oregonian writer Joseph Rose files this report on Oregon Live: Apparently the angry mom who declared she’d burn the copy of Andy Riley’s cartoon book The Book of Bunny Suicides her son brought home from the school library has had second thoughts. [...]
So, this dyslexic guy walks into a bra …
Funny? Cruel? Crude? Pointless?
Yeah, probably.
Humor has a way of picking at scabs, and it loves taboo territory: The shock factor of transgression is liberating. So, George Carlin’s seven dirty words. The flip-flopped race-baiting of Melvin Van Peebles‘ movie satire The Watermelon Man. The rank exploits [...]