Donde menos se piensa, salta la liebre—where you least expect it, the hare leaps. Sancho Panza’s proverb from the Second Part of Don Quijote conveys the suddenness with which insight can arrive. The hare leapt for me while reading Lydia Davis’s essay “Demanding Pleasures: On the Art of Observation” in Harper’s. Responding to the perennial […]
Category: Profile
Posted inProfile
Confluence
“Into the Night,” a new work for sitar, Indian classical ensemble and orchestra by sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun, begins with a nocturnal luminescence. Warm shimmering string tremolos give a harmonic foundation, over which a sitar melody blooms with bright, undulating streams of notes. These solo melodies become energetic dialogues. The esraj (a bowed […]
Posted inProfile
The Tomb or the Mouth
Dead or alive, neither dead nor alive, I am the opening, the tomb or the mouth, the one inside the other. —Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus pre-face Difficulties: with that word. How to read it? Two options. The first and most obvious suggestion is of a sustained consideration, long overdue, to the knotty, the many, and the […]
Posted inProfile
Resistance & Vision
Resistance always resists more or less well, first of all against itself, more or less powerfully. And more is less here. A resistance is never simple, and might is always a play of resistances with an intensity differential. —Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That is to Say… If there was no resistance, there would be […]
Posted inProfile
Uncommitting to Change
Some five years ago now, social media feeds went dark. In the bewildering first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, timelines filled with black squares to show solidarity with the global protests against racist police brutality. Such square-posters included the expected activists and signal boosters, but they also included major institutions of classical music like the […]
Posted inProfile
Bodies in Orbit
Etsurō Sotoo arrived in Barcelona in 1978, a classically trained Japanese sculptor who became captivated by the Sagrada Família. He began working there as a stonecutter, and over time, the eccentricity he initially perceived in Gaudí’s forms gave way to a sense of coherence. What had once seemed merely decorative revealed itself as the outward expression of […]
Posted inProfile
The Energy of the Moment
A train chugs along rhythmically, accompanied by otherworldly birds. Lazy chords blossom, like flowers from another world. A chaotic burbling morphs into an endless, glistening haze. These are just a few of the images conjured by “Escape Rites,” an album featuring several new works by JACK Quartet violinist Austin Wulliman. The works range from pensive […]
Posted inProfile
This Body, Given (noli me tangere)
Let there be writing, not about the body, but the body itself. Not bodihood, but the actual body. Not signs, images, or ciphers of the body, but still the body. This was once a program for modernity, no doubt already it no longer is. —Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus She is known, absolutely—by her blue hair and […]
Posted inProfile
History from the Bell Tower
The gargoyles wore beards of ice. Mary Clark noticed this detail through the early evening darkness as she pulled into a parking spot against the Cathedral close in January. The 82-year-old wondered how treacherous the sidewalks would be, particularly with the extra load of provisions she was carrying. The sandwiches and chips that she would […]
Posted inProfile
James Smidt Checks His Watch
Dressed in a black and gold silk Versace loungewear set, with giant Louis Vuitton sunglasses sliding down the brim of his nose, James Smidt sipped his second Manhattan as we chatted at the rooftop bar of The Empire Hotel in Lincoln Center. I asked him to describe his own aesthetic. “Cunt. Tastemaker, epochal artistic mover […]