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Relaunching Boles Dot Com as a Preservation Portal and Restoration Reserve

Since uploading over 500 videos to Vimeo PRO — I’ve been thinking about content and production and restoration and preservation of all the things I’ve worked on over the arc of a lifetime — and I decided now was the time to start digitizing the mountains of paper and film and video and audiotapes that engulf the small gully of my world.

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Demolishing Deconstructionism

“Deconstructionism” is a dangerous political application that has taken root in universities as a serious method of discovery and recognition of textual art in performance. Deconstructionism is nasty because — like Peer Gynt’s endless onion without a core — the whole attempt to pull apart and redefine the whole of something falls apart in your hands the moment you try to apply Deconstructionism’s molehill to a mound of merits.

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The Necessity of Expressionism in a Modern World

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari — “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” — is a silent 1920 German Gothic movie that set the new standard for terror in a darkened theatre, and that movie also epitomizes the artistic ideal of “Expressionism” that took populist hold in Germany after World War I.

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The Sean Hayes Newsweek Homophobic Slur

When I watched Forrest Gump navigating a boat and catching hundreds of pounds of fish, I never once thought to myself that it was completely unrealistic for Tom Hanks to portray a shrimp boat captain because he was not a shrimp boat captain. Nor did I have a problem with Gary Sinise as a lieutenant who lost his legs in Vietnam injury — even though I knew fully well that Gary’s legs were perfectly fine. Why, then, does Ramin Setoodeh of Newsweek insist that a gay man cannot convincingly play a straight character?

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Excoriating Naturalism and Realism

There is nothing worse in the Art World than Realism and Naturalism.  What good is an original painting that — “looks just like the photograph!” — when the duty of the Artist is to transform reality and bend understanding in new, and perhaps, unwanted and unheralded directions?  No talent is needed for mimicry or absolute imitation.

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Why You Button a Scene

There’s an old theatre chestnut — that is basically misunderstood — that goes a little something like this:  “Every scene needs to end on a button.”  Sometimes you’ll even see a director pacing at the back of the theatre asking out loud, “How do I button this scene?”

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Authenticity Over Gimmickry

It may seem curious to argue for authenticity in an aesthetic arena created on falsity, fantasy and the imperiled facade — but we all must strive for the authentic over the gimmick as we dare to present the world on stage.

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