Portraits of Me (by Colleagues)

I haven't posted any iPhone or iPad or scanned pen or pencil drawings in quite a while, mainly because I haven't had time to complete (m)any, but I've learned that there are J's Theater readers who take note of them, some of them quite distinguished colleagues, who have duly produced their own original drawings, in pen and colored pencil, of yours truly. I assured several of them that I would post their original drawings, so here they are.(© Brian...

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On Memorial Day

Installation View, Emily Princeat the Saatchi Gallery,via Saatchi GalleryToday, with Memorial Day in mind, I was thinking of artists who've attempted to capture the scale of loss the US and other countries have experienced as a result of the two recent wars (one sort-of-but-not-really-ended, in Iraq, the other ongoing with a sort of-deadline-in-sigh, in Afghanistan), and I recalled having come across the work of Emily Prince, a California-based artist...

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Valediction Forbidding Mourning, or Farewell to Evanston & Chicago

Part of my office bookshelves, soon to be packed upSince my colleagues and students at both institutions know, and since my family members and most friends know, and since C has asked me more than once when I'm going to do so, I figured that now that the spring quarter is nearly over (yes, it runs until mid-June) and I've already begun packing up, I can share with J's Theater readers who do not already know that, after nearly a decade in Chicago...

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Another Great Gatsby + Egan's Twitterature Experiment

Some people have too much money handy. What am I talking about? Baz Luhrman's initial trailer for his version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.Watching this, I have one question, whose answers I already know (A: "Because he can; because the producers imagine dollars flowing in based on the name, stars, style; because Hollywood is intellectually bankrupt and seems to have forgotten that there are countless novels written since The Great Gatsby that might make interesting films; because etc."). Why?***  Jennifer Egan, who received the...

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Congress's Speech, or They Don't Write Like They Used To

Yesterday, via Digby, I came across Lee Drutman's Sunlight Foundation's article on the "changing complexity of Congressional speech." According to the article, which Drutman and Dan Drinkard based on statistical analysis, using the Flesch-Kincaid test (which uses a "reads at a n-th grade level" standard), of the Capitol Words site's word cull of speeches given by members of Congress, the linguistic grade level among Congressional speakers on the...

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Five by (G.C.) Lichtenberg

20. The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak. (1773-1775)91. We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...  (1775-1776)20. Just as there are polysyllabic words...

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J's Theater Word Cloud, via Worldle

From Wordle, via Omnivoracious, a word cloud of my recent post(...

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HUMAN MICROPOEM @ Protest NATO Rally, Chicago

The 2012 NATO Summit is currently taking place in Chicago, and as I need not tell anyone, the city's and state response to dissent of any sort, by groups and people affiliated with the Occupy movement, longstanding peace and anti-war activists, veterans, union members, and others on the left and left-of-center who expressed a desire to assemble and march without confrontation, has been really over the top. From the militarization of the police forces...

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50+ Years of Musicmaking: André Watts

Watts in 1971Continuing the theme of invoking the great ones when they're still with us, I meant to post an entry on a true maestro, André Watts (1946-), who made his concert début with the New York Philharmonic 50 years ago this upcoming December when another maestro, Philharmonic conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, invited the 16-year-old Watts to perform Franz Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat at a Young People's Concert. The Philharmonic...

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International Day Against Homophobia + Donna Summer Passes

Today is International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO), the global day set aside to battle homophobia, one of the persistent and pernicious forms of oppression affecting US and every other society across the globe. As the late Barbara Smith wrote in her essay "Homophobia: Why Bring It Up?" (The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 1993), "Homophobia may well be the last oppression to go, but it will go. It will go a...

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Cecil Taylor on NPR + Poem

Cecil Taylor (from All About Jazz)Via his Twitter feed and New Black Man's blog, a very appropriate tribute for today, International Day Against Homophobia, one of jazz's and contemporary improvisatory music's greatest living and rare out queer figures, one of my heroes, Cecil Taylor (1929-). Over the last two weeks he's been honored with a series of concerts in New York City, and was the focus today of a segment NPR's All Things Considered. As someone...

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Remembering Carlos Fuentes & Christine Brooke-Rose

Carlos Fuentes, at home in Mexico, 2001 (Henry Romero/Reuters)In the mid-1980s, Carlos Fuentes (1928-2011) was at the height of his fame. He had published a dozen novels, many formally experimental, including a handful that made and cemented his reputation, among them his début, Where the Air Is Clear (La Región Más Transparente, 1958); Aura (1961), which continues to be censored in certain countries; The Hydra Head (La Cabeza de La Hidra, 1978);...

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Russian Writers Lead Protest Walk + Daniel Sada's Almost Never

Boris Akunin (© RIA Novosti. Ilia Pitalev)"[Writers are] engineers of the human soul."I'd never read this quote before, and having done so today, hesitated to reprint it, despite its truth, mainly because of who uttered it and how he acted on its ramifications. I'm talking about Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator whose ruthlessness has no peers in the modern history of that country. The tally of Stalin's victims is vast beyond accounting, perhaps,...

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Happy Mothers' Day

Best wishes for a Happy Mothers' Day to all mothers, grandmothers, motherly friends and guardians, and those who serve as mothers to others.To all of you, I say THANK Y...

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