Category Visual Arts

There’s a scene some 40 minutes into Netflix’s stirring documentary on musician/composer Jon Batiste when his adult self is back on the piano bench with his long ago teacher from Juilliard School of Music, working on Beethoven’s “Appassionata” sonata. Batiste starts in and his teacher brings him up short within seconds, even grabbing his hand off the piano as he sternly implores, “You have to breathe; you are not breathing!”

The teacher demonstrates, Batiste tries again, the teacher stops him again and says, “If you don’t breathe, it’s like a computer, it doesn’t express anything. You want life. Breathe!”

In some ways, the whole plot of “American Symphony” can be seen as Batiste working very, very hard, both out of virtuous striving for excellence and an absolute, desperate quest for emotional survival, to learn how to breathe. (The “wanting life” part has always seemed well in hand.)

Batiste is plainly on...

So much suffering. Catastrophe upon catastrophe, really, the long chronicle of humanity’s vast inhumanity and indifference to our fellow humans a kind of psychosis draped in the flags of country, religion, revolution, and perhaps the most fundamental, reptilian attachment of all: greed.

We want to look away, of course, the poet having long ago told us we “cannot bear very much reality.”

In truth, it is natural, and human, and necessary, to carry on so the world’s accumulated misery does not plunder our own capacity for the joy and love and yes, frivolity and ease that should also be everyone’s birthright, at least in some blessed moments out from under suffering’s dark, stifling cloak.

Yet how are we to know what befalls those in distant, denuded and warring lands absent those who consent to bearing witness, to staring the fullness of reality in its face and conveying what they have seen?

Few have stared a...

When my daughter was four or five years old, we took her to a highly touted “children’s movie” animation having to do with the escapades of a pony finding its way through fraught circumstances. I remember neither the title nor anything else to do with the plot save this: at one point, the pony was tied to a stake and thrashing helplessly as foreboding music swelled and some evil force prepared to descend upon it.

The movie ended for us right then because my daughter began to sob uncontrollably, fear and sorrow etched full upon her face. After a few murmured soothings from her mother and me proved completely fruitless, we exited the theater.

I thought back to that episode recently when finally catching up to “The Sopranos,” the multi-award-winning television series that had critics of the time swooning, but which I completely missed during its 1999-2007 run...

“If you are ever bored or blue, stand on the street corner for half an hour,” writes the visual artist and spare-time existential philosopher Maira Kalman in “The Principles of Uncertainty,” her wholly original, whimsical, disarmingly profound color-splash-of-a-book that caught my eye on a display table a few years ago in one of those small, impeccably curated bookshops in rural Maine, and which I finally got to reading this week. 

What you will see and experience on that corner, she says on a previous page that sets up her suggestion above, is “The People. Everyone looks so exalted, or so wretched, or so spiffy, so funny, so splendid.”

It is telling, in this literal celebration of the human pageant that Kalman illustrates so lavishly and in such quirky, loving, offbeat detail, that four out of the five adjectives she attaches to her fellow humans above stand as positive attributes.

And truth b...

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First: the primeval fear and wonder, the fact of existence itself, the gaping at the savannas, the odd and menacing creatures abounding, the vast sprawl of the stars. Noting the deep growl of hunger, the insistent urge to sample tubers, mushrooms, fruit from the trees, the slow and hapless life forms crawling beneath our gaze.

The terror of being prey for stronger and faster life forms, with their shrieks and snarls and rumbles through the night.

Hearing the helpless wails of our mates being devoured.

The seeking for shelter and haven.

The cowering.

The thinking.

The gathering of stones.

The noting of friction.

The sharpening.

The fine point, primed to stab and gouge, to ward off predators and subdue prey.

The sight of sparks.

The collecting of leaves and twigs.

Combustion.

All of it the rudiments of inquiry and physics itself.

The staggering growth of reason, tools, language, culture.

The imagi...