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The Curious Art of Caleb Larsen

I cannot figure out what to do with the artwork of Caleb Larsen. We have seen the mutilating world of scarification. We have swallowed hard the brutal images brought to us through the Event Horizon art display. But what to do with this — the kind of art work which doesn’t so much challenge your ideas or push your imagination so much as make you wonder why it is in a museum in the first place.  Let us first look at the work titled “The Day The Internet Told Us We Would Die.” The entire work consists of printouts of two dates — the date that a web site calculated that the artist would die, and the date that the site calculated that his wife would die. Two pieces of paper with printed death dates from a death date web site.

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Liviu Ciulei Fills the Empty Space

I met Romanian director and actor Liviu Ciulei while I was a graduate student at Columbia University.  He was teaching directing and Shakespeare and the first thing I learned from him was how to correctly spell his name.  That spelling talent came in handy because when others in the department needed to write Liviu a note, they sought me out for help in composing his name.  Liviu is more fragile today at age 87, but the strength of the name, and his talent, remains within me.

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Ten Twenty-Two

A serpent’s tooth.

A child’s bawl.

Together — they dance ungrateful.

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All Television Writing is Shakespeare

I recently wrote a WordPunk article called — Show Business Not Show Show — and the meat of that article argued Show Business is about making money and not creating art.

That said, we need to realize many professionally trained television writers — many are member of the Writers Guild — believe everything they write is on the quality level of Shakespeare… even if they are writing for situation comedies or reality shows.

That need to feel important and to lift the ordinary writing to higher level by historic association is vital to the author ego because it is a form of protection from the dual reality of their job:  Dreck passing for earnest entertainment.

Most television writing is pretty awful.  It lacks structure.  It has no substance, conflict, or dramatic core. 

Of course, no television author reading this thinks I’m writing about them — and we’d have it no other way.

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Bottom's Dream… Again

by Steve Gaines

It was…
let’s see
thirty-plus years ago
in another life
when I used to throw myself
into a part ill-advised and out of control
when I would measure success
by volume and G-forces

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Humility in Adoration

The lesson of Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus is that a King can fall if he does not humbly accept and respect the necessary love of the people.

When a leader fails to acknowledge the ecstasy of those in need of protection and refuses to accept the process of governance, the unfortunate result is a turning of the people against the power that can topple a regime and its civilization.

Coriolanus, though a King, could never rise above being anything more than a savage warrior who treated those who adored him with a poisonous disdain and his inability to accept what he viewed as unreasonable affection led him down to betrayal, treason and into his own death.

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