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
Category Archives: smARTy
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
South of Turtle Island
When I was a young man with a serious interest in the indigenous peoples of North America, the accepted theory of their origins was that they came from Siberia across the Bering Land Bridge about 12,500 years ago. Proposed origin dates before that time were dismissed by academics, but gradually we are coming to have Read More
Theatre From a Distance
A very bright young student of theatre by the name of Janice Rabian posted an interesting study of her industry’s response to the pandemic that has closed live performances for most of 2020 and the foreseeable future. Necessity being the Mother, it’s worth a look at how innovative people in the field are reacting, what Read More
Play4Keeps
When we began this website, the focus was Center for the New Northwest, a non-profit center for ideas about change. One of the things we wanted to change was Ashland New Plays Festival. A proud promoter of new works for the stage and the playwrights who write them, ANPF for nearly three decades had been Read More
Clownfrontational
There’s nothing funny about authoritarian systems. But there are clever ways to protest them. Taking it to the streets, clown style here. And it is worth noting that activism roils clowndom, too, as our institutions undergo generational soul searching here.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Interview
The late, great artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who were preparing the ground for their proposed Over the River Project on the Arkansas River in Southern Colorado, sat down with me for an interview in January, 2002. The result, which was published in Eye Level and is reprinted below, was used by them on their Read More