Art and Politics
the history of a relationship

Throughout human history, there have been two constants: the need to create art, and the need to create history. And just as constant has been the need of those who create the latter to solicit the total and unquestioning support of those who create the former.
Miles David Moore

From Shakespeare
to Oklahoma
a history of byways

Julie Taymor's new film of The Tempest is a "re-imagining" of Shakespeare's last play.  Well, that was what the announcer on the radio said. And this is where theatre history wakens the crank in me. First, all plays are re-imagined with every production.
Nathan Thomas

Ballet
dancing with history

Catherine de Medici's sons, Charles IX and Henri III, shared her enthusiasm for the allegorical performances and ceremonial processions that originated in Italy and depicted ideas from Catholicism and chivalry. In spite of the brutality of 16th century France before, during and after the reign of Charles IX, he founded the Académies de Poésie et de Musique. His motives were not purely aesthetic, however.
Catherine Conway Honig

Luang Pho Sila

From the past to the present, Luang Pho Sila is a sacred Buddha statue which is venerated by the residents of Muang Thungsaliem in Sukhothai province. It has a long, mysterious history.
 It is assumed that the statue is over 800 years old and was discovered in 1929 by villagers who gathered the bat excrements from the Chao Ram cave. In the same year, the statue was transferred to Wat Thungsaliem temple. In 1986, it was stolen.
Janine Yasovant

Paul Bowles
a rebellious history

Paul Bowles lived most of the years of the 20th century and was certainly a product of the Jazz Age, which he contributed to with his musical compositions and in the way he lived his life as a rebellious American who moved outside the norms established by the white middle class.
Karren Alenier

One Who Falls Off Horses

There's a telling moment in the acclaimed 2009 documentary Reel Injun, in which an elderly Navaho gentleman watches an old clip of himself falling off a horse in an old John Ford western.  He laughs it off, but in that instant you get a sense of how Hollywood for decades portrayed the Native American.  
Les Marcott

Penelope and the Darkling

A new year in a new decade always has me looking back at my own personal history and what inspired me to fashion a lifestyle of creativity. A lifestyle so full of uncertainties. It begins with my parents, of course, both artists who exposed their children to music, art, dance, theatre, literature, architecture and just about anything that was about the beauty and the emotion of it and not just the bottom line dollar. But my passion had its true birth in books. 
Lia Beachy

An All Too Brief But
Absolutely Divine
History of Me

Hi, I'm God.  I'm crazed. With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, censorship (the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery removing a video from its "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" exhibit), sickness, envy, and recovering from my New Year's festivities, I barely have a chance to breathe.  But, though I'm the Perfect Being, I'm not free of ego. 
Kathi Wolfe

Immortal Diva
as old as a quirk

Our historical era has a love affair with the undead. Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer & Co, True Blood, Let the Right One In, I Dracula… the list goes on. Wishful fantasy of a quickly aging society? No wonder an opera about an undead woman – The Makropulos Case – is hip right now.
Renate Stendhal

A Brief History of Writing
By Design

Log shards under
maul's blow

(I feel the edge
split my skull,)

until rhythm and steel and
sharp tang of riven oak

(gnaw occiput, cleave atlas,
banish pelvis until)
Michael Bettencourt

From These Roots

Soon after JJB arrived he began reacting to the music around our house. One of his all time favorites was a tiny Spanish maraca given to him ca. 3 months old, lying in the sun on the deck, by the little girls next door. Winding the pendulum clock ('Bong!') in the kitchen was a very early prerequisite to starting our day.
Claudine Jones

From Desperate
to Real

Since I wrote a review of the film "Dairy of A Mad Housewife" in 1970, when political feminism was beginning to flourish, women in America have achieved great lifestyle freedoms, legal protection and career opportunities, but one choice many women still invest in is marriage.  While the demands of this domestic position have changed in the past 40 years, especially the need for most women to work, the dilemmas of long-term commitment, fidelity and child rearing remain the same. 
Griselda Steiner