I went to my high school reunion last weekend. We have one every 5 years and I’ve gone to all of them. I guess I want to show my graduating class that I have survived, thrived, succeeded, and that I am proud enough of my accomplishments to continue to show up. One former classmate has not been so fortunate. Although he has built a successful business, he is still tormented by demons and bullies from the past. He was very upset to see a typo in a printed flyer from the reunion photographer. His reaction seemed a bit over the top to me; being in the print and design field, you get used to these things. I showed this flyer to a number of people, and no one saw the typo, even after being told to look for it. Recently a Long Wharf piece came back from the printer with an unfortunate ommission. It is just one of those moments when you realize that as careful as you have tried to be, something just slipped by unnoticed. In the newspaper business this happens often. Sometimes it happens in front page headlines, and even though many many people are staring at it for several hours before it goes on press, it somehow still winds up in print. I take it as a message to breathe, slow down and pay attention. Even when you are too busy to think.

I love Donald Margulies’ comment about life being too short for The New Yorker. I couldn’t agree more! I am constantly juggling my New Yorker reading with all my other reading. If I read a novel I get behind on The New Yorker. If I keep up with The New Yorker I get behind on all my other reading. It really makes me crazy that they come out with a summer reading issue every year. Since when does life stop in the summer? Do I have more time to read in the summer? No…in fact I’m much busier in the summer, with my garden and my biking, to carve out any extra reading time!

Moving right along….there was a wonderful large graphic in the Times recently (yes, I try to keep up with the Times as well!) about campaign logos. The artist, Ward Sutton, analyzes all the presidential campaign logos for color choice, impact, and overall look. In the last panel, he acknowledges that it is all in the eyes of the beholder anyway. Nothing could be more true. This is a constant challenge for those of us in the visual arts. It isn’t enough if you know your design works in all the ways it should; if the client doesn’t like it (for whatever subjective reason) it is back to the drawing board.

When I was a child, I had this old metal white painted bed that the paint was starting to chip off of. I just remember slowly chipping away at it with my finger nail - kind of like when you have a sunburn and you’re peeling away at the skin!

I was chastised and told to stop it, but couldn’t help myself. My parents kept saying they were going to repaint it, but never got around to it. It’s just one of those weird things one remembers that doesn’t really mean much of anything.

St. Ann’s Warehouse seeks artists for Puppet Lab

Deadline for Proposals: December 5th, 2007

The Puppet Lab  is an eleven year old developmental laboratory for artists working within  the medium of puppetry. Five to eight artists and/or collaborative teams  will be selected by a panel on the basis of a proposed project. The works  selected for development within the Lab will be given an in-progress,  public presentation at the end of the Lab season at St. Ann’s Warehouse.  This year the Lab will operate from January 2008 – December 2008 with  weekly Monday night meetings in St.
Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO.

For  more information visit our website at:
http://www.stannswarehouse.org/puppet_lab.php

To download  an application visit:
http://stannswarehouse.org/uploaded_files/PuppetLab08App.pdf

another thought is the old question about “how to get the best out of people” or at least “theatre people”… i’m finding out with these opportunities that are offered to our staff (like 365, or DISCOVERY DAY, or the PLAY READING CLUB on Mondays) that it’s the creative soul that needs to be fed every once in a while. And feeding that –even in small ways– makes the detail work we’re all struggling with every day more worthwhile. Another way is trusting people … trusting that they can get the job done. letting everybody experience a sense of accomplishment and task completed. And finally, fostering the belief that in the end –and especially in theatre– it’s all about collaboration. Viewing collaboration as a richness, not as competition.

in my leave of absense from the blog, i did have a couple of thoughts
i knew were meant for this: one is my final entry about what i know
nothing about: baseball. I read it some weeks ago in The New Yorker
(see also p.s.).  It’s about how “you can’t understand America unless
you get baseball” –Maybe this explains some of my confusions about
this country??

p.s. There’s a line in COLLECTED STORIES by Donald Margulies “life is
too short for The New Yorker” –said by this professor and writer. I
kind of agree if I look at the two-month old stack of which i’ve read
two and a half articles. tops. O, and that’s why I can’t find the
reference any more!

wondering why i haven’t been able to find a little time for little
blog entries,
then realized that the title of my blog, POSTCARDS FROM A CROWDED
DESK, explains it all.
i’ve been submerged by virtual and material documents and ideas and
texts and organizational/philsophical big and small details in the
last few weeks. i’ve emerged. for a little bit anyway.

Ben Cameron, keynote speaker at the Southern Arts Federation, speaks about the issues facing the arts. Really gets the cogs turning…

Thank you for that lovely introduction and that kind reception. While I realize that Louisville—or Luhavul—does not necessarily consider itself a Southern City, I find myself here among many of my fellow Southern bretheren—to whom I say, “What a pleasure to be back among people where I don’t have to explain that Southern men who call their fathers daddy do so out of emotional strength rather than mental deficiency; where true haute cuisine is a plate of barbecue, a side of hush puppies, a jar of sweet tea and a Krispy Kreme donut; and where the three most important words in the English language, especially during NCAA March madness, are ‘Anybody but Duke.’” It’s good to be back home.

And indeed, we are all home, not because of geography, but because we are now among a family where all of us care deeply and passionately about the arts—a different home that is in a turmoil unlike any I have seen in my 30 years in the field.

This turmoil was apparent in a series of national conversations in dance, presenting and theatre, designed to capture the current state of the performing arts, that the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation convened last year.

(more…)

It seems as if the theme of family dynamics has been everywhere lately. I recently saw two compelling movies: “Everything is Illuminated” and “51 Birch Street.” (An aside: the former has a really incredible soundtrack). 51 Birch Street tells the story of the Block family through the eyes of the son Doug, a documentary filmmaker. During the making of the film his mother suddenly dies. And then the real story begins, told through her journals and her husband, who marries again 3 months after her death. It seems as no one in the family really knew anyone else at all. Sound familiar? Everything is Illuminated is the film version of the Jonathan Safran Foer book, in which he travels to the Ukraine to find the woman who supposedly saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Again, the truth is nothing anyone could have imagined. Along with the great soundtrack, this film also gets my vote for one of the most beautiful and surreal scene ever filmed: an old stone house with lines of billowing laundry out front, set in an enormous field of sunflowers.