I got the last copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad at B’s & N’s yesterday.
You haven’t had a burger until you’ve had a Sugar Burger. Somehow you have to get yourself to Embudo, New Mexico (some say Dixon, some say Velarde) beside the Rio Grande River between Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico to get your hands on one of them, but once you do it will be difficult, if not impossible, to eat any other kind of burger once you’ve tasted a Sugar Burger.
The philosophy Make Art, not War is one I grew up with. My parents were surrounded by artists, artists who worked obscurely at their crafts in the deserts of Northern New Mexico, artists who took a long time to make names for themselves, because things taking a long time is rather part and parcel of working in obscurity.
“You’ve said that twice in the last 15 minutes,” my friend Hartley noted, watching me wolf down a spicy fish taco at Bill’s Burger Bar just off Rockefeller Plaza.
This is the way I feel this morning. Smoky.
Something a little dreamy
Under a mound of dirt you lay
I imagine a saxophone
Playing ‘Round Midnight
Maple trees line the road
Their shade saved for the living
While you lay beneath the blazing sun
As long as I’m in the Hip Hop Music Mood, or Mode, whichever you prefer, I might as well be in the Hip Hop Dance…
In the Summer of 2006, the day before I returned to New York after using my entire year’s vacation to study Italian at the Università per Stranieri in Siena, Italy, I took an early bus to Arezzo and spent the morning roaming the city taking pictures. After the cool early hours had morphed into lunchtime, I found a little trattoria on a small piazza where I could have a salad and a cold glass of Prosecco to ward off the heat that had begun to rise from the cobbled vicolos.
The Argentine Tango.
Attached is an optimistic article on Aducanumab, a new drug being developed by Biogen that (hopefully) shows the…
I watch the mesquite-scented smoke plume rise from the incense burner and remember Winters in the New Mexico desert.
Dance with yourself
It turns out that Doris Day, Bob Dylan and Emmy Rossum have something in common, which is an apparent appreciation…
I ought to have been born between the World Wars, when it was romantic to be sentimental, when having an attachment to the past was normal, when lovers would hand-write nostalgia-filled letters whenever apart, when taking a journey down a memory lane strewn with tales of adventures and friends and events long gone by could rouse a spontaneous and unembarrassed launch into Doris Day’s and Les Brown’s rendition of A Sentimental Journey.
When I was in high school I knew nothing of poetry, except a schoolgirl’s frustration at not being able to answer…
On the Upper West Side of New York, across town from my apartment, rage foments outside of the Metropolitan Opera’s…
“Certain things fall silent in us when we think that certain things are no longer possible.” – Frank Bidart, Poet,…
The Fogs of August
I don’t watch much television, but these past few months I have looked forward to late Sunday nights with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, an update of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which aired in 1980 to mesmerized viewing.
Standing on the barren landscape of what was once Uruk in ancient Sumer, now known as Iraq, in The Immortals (Episode 11 of the modernized series), Tyson tells us about Enheduanna, an Akkadian Princess (2285-2250 BCE) about whom I had never heard until The Immortals aired on May 18, 2014.
Lovers loving. Dancers dancing. Fountains rising and falling. At the ballet.
‘Twould appear this Sunday morning that March is wrestling with whether to remain a Lion, or to become a Lamb.
This ice dance between Meryl Davis and Charlie White is sublime.
Forgive my appearance, my Lady.
Women at work: Lyrical Confessions of an Erstwhile Renegade, my first essay as Editor-at-Large for SynaptIQ+: The Journal for Social Era Knowledge, was published online in the Winter 2013 issue.
“Had I spent my time trying to out-sex, out-nubile, out-Va Va Voom other girls and women?” – Giselle Minoli, Women…
There is something lovely that happens when you ask to take someone’s picture, instead of merely trying to capture a…
Saturday she appeared
Every evening I must weigh
A Woman’s Worth was published online in the August 2013 issue of SynaptIQ+: The Journal for Social Era Knowledge.
There must be a way
Morning, everyone
We are lying on our backs looking up into the pastel-hued interior of The Guggenheim spiral.
What would come to mind if I were to ask each of you what inspires you?
This morning
Splendid Isolation is the choreographer Jessica Lang’s dance tribute to the marriage between Gustav Mahler, the…
You don’t really see me
In a garden there are manners.
An exquisitely choreographed dance between a man and a woman.
Evening, Thursday, 6:30pm EST.
The news did not exactly come as a shock. I had filed away the possibility that his life would end one day in the part of my brain reserved for things I simply did not want to think about happening. A less willful, less stubborn, less enthusiastically alive man would have long ago succumbed to the many illnesses he had endured over the last 2 decades. His ability to push back had convinced me that nothing could kill him. An email in mid-March relaying that he was in hospice care switched on the emotional regulator that controlled my reservoir of memories about him, sending through a few at a time, as though dropping them into my consciousness in a metered manner would avoid a flood tide the day he finally decided to part this Earth.
A length of leg.
Five Talented Dancers + an Empty Warehouse + the Countryside + a Video Camera x the Human Condition = Gravity of Center, a choreographed site specific conversation between 3 men and 2 women. It’s impossible to explore this kind of movement in a traditional studio or theatre space. Remove dance from a constrained space, no matter how well-designed the set, and “stage” it in nontraditional indoor and outdoor spaces and the movement conversation changes, expands and challenges the viewer.
Cheers, everyone
I wrote A Woman’s De-Liberation: There Never Was a Sexual Revolution in stupefied disbelief that Sheryl Sandberg, the successful and highly educated woman at the COO helm of the legendary FaceBook, would write Lean In, a modern feminist call-to-arms, in which she essentially claims that women, individually and collectively, are not occupying their rightful place at the top of the business world next to men because they do not know how to use their negotiating skills to their professional advantage.
This assertion flies in the face of what I have personally witnessed in business over the course of the last 35 years of my life, during which time I have seen scores of brilliant, visionary and highly assertive women be turned down repeatedly for seats at the top for reasons that have nothing to do with their lack of skill or their unwillingness to be assertive, and everything to do with the massive support structure that men provide one another…a support structure that is unavailable to women because there simply are not enough of them in top management to provide a supportive structure for other women coming up the ladder.
