June 10, 2016 · Speculation
There’s something nobody tells you about being a kid at rehearsal. How the adults stop being adults for a minute. How they shed all that bullshit, the mortgage anxiety, the careful professional face, the parental authority, and become something else entirely. Something rawer. Something that plays. I grew up in rehearsal spaces. Theaters that smelled […]
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May 30, 2016 · Industries
Built in 1937, Memorial Auditorium squats at the heart of Stanford’s campus, a monument to the dead of World War I that somehow became a venue for everything from visiting orchestras to corporate motivational speakers hawking the next big disruption. The interior is vast and unforgiving. Those hard seats don’t give a damn about my […]
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May 20, 2016 · Individualism
Look at those hands. Two generations of women who’ve spent their lives insisting that the body means something beyond what commerce wants to sell us, beyond what convention wants to contain. Anna Halprin, 90 something years deep into the radical proposition that movement is democratic, that anybody’s dance matters, holding hands with Tonyanna Borkovi, who’s […]
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May 17, 2016 · Engineering
Buildings without foundations will inevitably come down. I can be fooled, but my kids won’t be… either we will correct what’s wrong, it will be corrected for us. James Baldwin, Take This Hammer We’re real good at forgetting where we buried the bodies. Or in this case, where we buried the plutonium. Hunters Point. Say […]
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May 8, 2016 · Individualism
She was the kind of woman who understood, fundamentally, that comfort is the enemy of everything worth doing, that real power doesn’t come from being liked but from being necessary when everything’s falling apart. In the art world she knew every hustle, spotted every inflated price, every lazy shortcut passed off as craftsmanship. Storekeepers saw […]
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May 3, 2016 · Industries
There’s this thing that happens when you walk into a space like YBCA and someone’s decided to call the thing a retrospective. That word alone, retrospective, it’s already half-dead on arrival, embalmed in institutional reverence before the first note even sounds. But what I’m getting from this image, from whatever the hell Luciano conjured in […]
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May 1, 2016 · Absolute Solipsism
my father Charles R. Lyons in Shakespeare’s Love Labour’s Lost for Farm Players at Stanford University mid 1960s LOOK AT THIS MAGNIFICENT BASTARD. Stanford University, mid 1960s, some production of Love’s Labour’s Lost that probably nobody remembers except it’s Shakespeare and Shakespeare MATTERS because Shakespeare understood that language is the only weapon we’ve got against […]
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