Posts I like
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Is Consumerism Killing Our Creativity?How much time do you spend consuming knowledge, inspiration, or creative stimulation in a day? This drive to...
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Andrea, Tayrona Park. Colombia. August 2010
“Philosophy is properly Home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.”
Novalis- Prose writer, poet, mystic, philosopher, civil engineer.
Susan Sontag responded to this quote in her introduction to E.M. Cioran’s “The Temptation to Exist” that “if the human mind can be everywhere at home, it must in the end give up its local “European” pride and something else- that will seem strangely unfeeling and intellectually simplistic- must be allowed in. “All that is necessary,” says Cage, “is an empty space of time and letting it act in its magnetic way.”
My dear friend Jenny Rebecca Nelson takes incredible photographs. This is from a long, late-afternoon summer walk in Chelsea. I walked by this picture, but she spotted it.
Traveling in the Japanese high-speed train Shinkansen from Shinosaka to Tokyo. Filmed by Daihei Shibata
Case Study: Cirque de Legume
Cirque de Legume is currently presenting their play “Cirque de Legume” at 59 east 59th street theaters, last year’s hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. A classic red-nosed clown piece that zooms back and forth between the cutely uncomfortable to the grotesque and obscene. It is composed of a scenes that transform the common vegetable (romaine lettuce, carrots, beets) or the not so common (artichoke, leeks) into the center piece of a whirlwind of slapstick and subtle physical humor. (I heard one child in the audience yell out when they brought out the artichoke, “What is THAT mom?”)
It starts with the way many clown shows do; the clowns come on stage and stand there, looking at the audience timidly, awkwardly fixing their clothing, searching for a sound or a word to speak. The audience begins to quietly laugh, not sure what to do. The clowns respond to the audience, looking directly at them, allowing their vulnerability to be seen. The energy of the room begins to settle together and sync up.
Cirque de Legume did this in total silence for at least 5 minutes. We could hear the other members of the audience shifting and muffling their laughter as we tried to decide if we were going to give ourselves the permission to laugh. (We did.)
As a starting place for the show, this quiet beginning gave us common ground to stand on and prepare for the onslaught. It helped us to throw off whatever meeting, obligation, or job we had been at before the performance, and relax into it.
