Yearly Archives 2023

Artists often reflect ancient conundrums. To varying degrees, the driving force of their work consists of seeing the world as few others do—more deeply, with greater sensitivity, more laden with feeling, judgment, nuance, beauty, curiosity, obsession, mystery.  A common refrain: they feel in the world but not of it, with warring impulses to hold it close and finally break its code or push it away as something alien and irredeemable.

The classical (Romantic Era) composer Frédéric Chopin, born in Poland in 1810, embodied all these conundrums and more in a life often compromised and ultimately cut short by tenuous health that saw him dead at age 39 from multiple complications of tuberculosis.

But like many artistic geniuses almost bouncing out of the cradle eager to begin dropping their works into posterity (he wrote his first polonaise, a traditional Polish dance form, at age 7), Chopin at 20 was alrea...

The perpetrators at least have something resembling an excuse. Although specific medical diagnoses of any given mass shooter fall along a spectrum that may or may not include the frequent, often wrongly used catch-all term, “psychopath,” I strongly doubt that any mental health professional would disagree that all such perpetrators are, by both common and professional understanding, “disordered.”

Whatever compulsions inspire them to commit such heinous acts, it sets them at odds, in a profoundly anti-social way, from most all the rest of their societal peers who reflexively recoil from what they have beheld.

I don’t pretend to understand the precise disorders that drive such behavior (assuming any such understanding is even possible)...

An aging expat journalist, British-born and bred but now 20 years in his country’s last colonial outpost of Hong Kong, is battling his own sell-by date while ostensibly trying to report on the historical forces that had long been unleashed by the island country’s 1997 handover to communist China. Largely student-led protesters make nightly appearances in the streets, trying to evade tear gas and police batons as they decry the oft-predicted reality that China’s promises of a hands-off policy toward Hong Kong’s mostly democratic rule are proving empty.

Meanwhile, the journalist’s pal from his university days at Cambridge, scion of a wealthy Hong Kong family, is up to his ears in the duplicity and semi-recklessness peculiar to a certain kind of privilege. The journalist ultimately makes the decision to report on that recklessness when it leads to deadly consequences.

Or did it?

This is the basic setting for ...

A few years ago, I was writing a script and coordinating with a production company to create a short video with narration and music. Part of my task was to amass a large cache of photos, each of which could match relevant parts of the narration. The protocol in such projects is to give the editor far more photos than he or she will need, and I dutifully performed that function to what I thought was completion.

So I was rather taken aback when the editor complained the next week that he didn’t have nearly enough photos to finish the job. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “How could this be? A hundred and fifty photos for a five-minute show isn’t enough?”
Him: “No way.”
Me: “By my count, that’s one every two seconds!”
Him: “People these days want really fast-moving pictures. They get bored if it’s too slow.”
Me: “People these days?…Bored? Too slow?”

And so on.

***

***

I’m put in mind of that co...

In her slim 2013 volume, “On Beauty and Being Just,” Harvard Professor Elaine Scarry attempts to unravel the mysterious pull and effect of the beautiful on human consciousness. Far from being mere surface gloss obscuring the deeper or truer nature of any given object or experience, beauty is central to human experience, summoning us to ever deeper exploration—and our own depths in responding to it.

“Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation,” she writes.

And perhaps most importantly, beauty instills in us a desire to both replicate and share it—to point, to exclaim, to paint, to sing and dance and exult, to communicate about how we have been moved and inspired and ultimately, changed by it.

And to advance the possibility that others might be changed, too.

Shari...