ART
Jess Shattuck’s much-anticipated third novel, The Women in the Castle, revolves around the lives of three wives of resistors in Nazi Germany during World War II. Shattuck, best known for her novels The Hazards of Good Breeding and The Perfect Life, grew up in Cambridge with a German-born mother who had immigrated to America, shunning her nation and her own parents’ dark past as Nazi sympathizers. Memories of her mother’s shame have stayed with Shattuck long after her mother’s sudden death left many of her questions unanswered when Shattuck was a teenager. It has taken her seven years to research and write this novel, with years spent traveling to Germany and combing through material to research this historical piece of fiction in which she explores the normalization of fascism in a society, and the moral fiber it takes to stand up to it and hold on to what is humane and true.
In his first short, Dave Cripton interviews Rico Gatson, A NYC visual artist based in Brooklyn. Even though Gatson uses painting, video, sculpture and installation, he prefers not to be defined by any single medium, even though he uses many and thinks of himself as an object maker. He produces work in which racial commentary is readily apparent while conveying notions of historical uncertainty via mixed symbols and open-ended statements.
For Neil, there is a real break between jewelry used by the aristocracy where the jewelry was handed down, and glamour. For him, that aristocratic jewelry was all about wealth and power and with those glamour jewels, it's all about this performance quality.
I have failed so many times. Scripts that didn't sell. Readings that bombed. Pilots that weren't picked up. Jobs I didn't get. I definitely mope and feel awful about myself after these rejections, but I move on.
What is Urban Alienation?
The notion of a social foil is definitely what my public work is about. How do you make creative structure that allows people to interact with one another in a playful and creative way?
For me, the photographic process is a process of redemption – not just for me but also for many of the people that I photograph. I’m always striving to look at things, even the difficult things, the uncomfortable things.
There's a lot of interest today in the importance of sensorial delivery, particularly scent, but also taste and touch to our health. Not having those experiences in our digital existence, whether we want that digital existence or not, is hurting us and that's becoming clear in lots of different ways. Listen here
There were maybe a thousand businessmen murdered in the '90s in Russia. These guys built their wealth, and essentially built Putin along the way. It was one of those things from which you can't turn away. Listen here
It's very important to keep commissioning choreographers and new work because one might not just open a window – but a gate like Balanchine did.
There has been much to celebrate as one-by-one local, students and patrons from afar return to their beloved Fogg to see the transformation by virtuoso architect Renzo Piano who has left his imprint of steel, glass, timeless lines and light.
If the urban is about diversity, how can we keep talking about the city in the singular? Maybe there's another way we can talk about it.
Having surviving children, the only thing worse than losing one child, would be to have the other two lose their childhood. I felt a really powerful desire to make sure that didn’t happen.
I would like it to be accepted that each of us knows but a sliver of the larger nature of reality and that by ourselves we can never really understand the greater whole.
I can't really lament nostalgically for some time when we were nobler or better on the subject of art or any other subject. People act like jerks most of the time. Most of us do.
It’s a metaphor for a way of being in the world, in that you need to be able to go in, share what you want to share, and leave without a trace. It's like going camping. It must have a light footprint.
I actually would like people to stand in their space and consider where they are and really understand their localness. Just going, 'okay, this is where I am.
I couldn't have possibly written the kind of things I write about in I Remember about Washington today because it was completely different – It was kind of like a small town in the Kennedy days.
I think longing is a desire that doesn't expect to be fulfilled. If you think of Ode on a Grecian Urn, what's depicted on the urn is always in the moment of anticipation and never actually consummated. In some strange way, that's the most delicious moment. Longing is the desire to prolong that moment, and to understand – maybe not even consciously – that to get what you wanted would end it.
What is theater? Is it a play in an auditorium on a stage or is it a social event? Is it a community event? Where is it? Is it at a nightclub like Donkey Show or is it outside on the Charles River?
It’s so easy to make a house be zero net energy, to the point you can heat your house with a hair dryer.
I love the puzzle of it. I love that it's unending, that there is no solution but there is a solution. It can be mathematical in a way. It's a puzzle and a game.