One day when I was a young man working at The Denver Post, a reporter I admired dropped by my desk to give me some surprising news. His name was John Dunning, he was a few years older than I, and struck me as equal parts 1930s movie character and Jack Kerouac protagonist. John Read More
Category Archives: smARTy
Serial Literature
Streaming literature has a very rich history and a plausibly bright future, each for it’s own reason. The former because the price was right; the latter because it fits the contemporary attention span. The great novelists of the 19th century, Dumas, Flaubert, Thackeray, Eliot, and especially the “father” of the form, Charles Dickens, produced their Read More
Free Form
“Whoever controls the media controls the mind,” said the poet Jim Morrison, lead singer for the Doors in the late 1960s. “Who are the Brain Police?” asked Frank Zappa of the Mothers of Invention is his 1966 album Freak Out. Those quotes and so many more like them were just part of that drug-addled Read More
Sociometry
YES! There really is an Institute of Sociometry and, yes, it is helmed by two artists, partners Heather Link-Bergman and Peter Miles Bergman, who claim a collective of over 700 special authorized agents in 23 countries join them in their efforts at culture jamming and guerrilla communications. As artists, they take a more adventurous approach Read More
Translocal Arts Activism
An interesting discussion with Complex Movements, an artist-activist collective in Detroit, about the intersection of art, technology, and commodification in trying to build “translocal” alliances for change here.
About Love and Tyranny
Anand Giridharadas in conversation with biographer Ann Heberlein about her new book, On Love and Tyranny, The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt, “a thinker with profound relevance to this moment.” https://the.ink/p/arendt?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta
The Oldest Story
By choice I’ve spent most of my life among storytellers. Poets, novelists, playwrights, songwriters, and just sitting around the campfire tellers of tales. I love stories and the people who tell them. Have you ever wondered what might be the oldest story of them all? The one that’s been told longer than any other? One Read More
50 Years of Patti Smith
Highly recommend this brief, poignant interview with the artist Patti Smith as she prepares for an anniversary performance in London 50 years after her first appearance in New York City here. She’s covered a lot of ground in her time and produced some amazing work.
Performance
Dramatists, directors, actors all will tell you the same thing about it: theatre is when strangers come together to share a common experience. What is so unique is the connection between artists and audience. The same could be said of all the performing arts in pre-pandemic times. What about streaming theatre? The various ways the Read More
Paying More and Getting Less
The damage done to the employment prospects of recent college graduates by the pandemic, and the litany of other 21st century disasters that preceded it, is severe. The pain is compounded by the cost of the education they pursued in good faith, only to have far fewer opportunities available to them than their parents’ generation. No Read More