"At this juncture, Marken reminded the audience that "the liberal arts satisfy something distinctly human inside us, a craving to know that seems to be natural and innate; they are personally empowering - they give insight without experience ... We must see the liberal arts for what they are - a central way, however flawed, of making society smarter, more intelligent, more careful and thoughtful in areas that matter."
Fearing that it is already too late to change the course of university teaching, Marken told the audience, 'I was naive. I said too little and too late.'"(On Campus News|Marken says university teaching headed in some wrong directions)

:: note :: . . . Marken was one of my mentors . . . taught me one class (Irish Literature) . . . one class was a lifetime of learning . . . the passion of teaching, history, literature, poetry & life of art . . . every meeting since that class is filled with joy & respect . . .

:: note :: . . . thanks to the students & USSU . . . to be honoured with a teaching excellence award from the students is the greatest gift an educator may receive . . .

"Theatre, come to my rescue !
I am asleep. Wake me
I am lost in the dark, guide me, at least towards a candle
I am lazy, shame me
I am tired, raise me up
I am indifferent, strike me
I remain indifferent, beat me up
I am afraid, encourage me
I am ignorant, teach me
"(Ariane Mnouchkine |International Theatre Institute WORLD THEATRE DAY - 27th March 2005 International Message )

:: note :: . . . there is no greater spokesperson for today/yesterday/tomorrow . . . easter/birthday/world theater day . . . Mnouchkine continues to be visionary . . .

at the edge
at the seams
where the fabric of life tightens taut
the ancient lava and sea salt sounds a perfect long

silence

clearing the throat
scanning the skies
lips dry wandering
a siren echoes incantations at the corners of the soul

red

. . . Mom becomes 80 . . .

calm waters
gentle winds
warm skies
peaceful days
guide your way

. . . students present a meditation of the way of the cross . . .

the snowbound road rolls slowly
cut-up & stretched-out
a residue of an aborted journey
foreshortened & retracted
privately exhausted, publicly disappointed

fields flow eeriely too far over an inherent cemetery emptiness
pointing to a blindspot
a deadend

heartscraps
secret scarred skin
in a false snow night
stammering with pierced throat thin

scatched we lay beneath the permafrost
lightshards scattered blinding the visiondrifts

Students at Holy Cross High School performed Joseph Heller's Catch 22 with maturity and grace . . . the humour was mindfully understated as demanded by this morally serious and dark comic masterpiece . . . characterizations of Yossarian and his many antagonists varied from sketchy & scurrile to bold & broad . . . impressive pacing . . . actors flowed across the stage effortlessly creating an epic feel to the many vignettes . . .

Heller would have approved . . . although individual performances shone it was the ensemble which took us to the horrible bitter confusion which embraces the body of a war run by lunatics and shysters . . . the concluding feverish nightmare infected us with the themes of greed, guilt, fear and paranoia like an absurd virus . . . the grey crumbling walls depicted the bleak background perfectly . . . perhaps a little more attention to the minimal props could have deepened the satire . . . projection and technical precision develop with experience & the young artists need time - both rehearsal and performance opportunities to sharpen their skills . . .

last years Tom Stoppard The Real Inspector Hound proved to be a fertile exercise into the skewed humour needed for Catch 22 . . . the director/educator Blaine Hart must be commended for his choice of material and guidance . . . word, words, words need to be translated into action . . . actors study action and it was a joy to see the catch of the extraordinary grotesque Catch 22 become physicalized . . . thanks & continue your subversive non sequitur journey . . .

"There is this notion that good criticism (like the spurious Fox Cable News) must be "fair-and-balanced," whereas anyone who has ever written criticism knows that, to be respectful of the art form, it must be blunt, unequivocal and brutally honest -- even if it gives offense."( Swans Commentary |English vs. American Theatre Criticism by Charles Marowitz)

:: note :: . . . oh so difficult to be blunt, unequivocal and brutally honest . . . courage i s demanded . . . trust in instincts & the intelligence of feeling . . .

"If we look closely at the essence of art (and more generally philosophy, and science), we can analytically see the similarity between creativity (or more specifically genius), and madness. Creativity brings the otherworldly, as in either subjective fantasy, or hitherto unknown truth. Meaning that the genius must delve into the unknown to bring it to the attention of society. By nature of knowing something that the masses do not know, the creative are aberrant, meaning they diverge from common experience."(Kuro5hin | Pharmaceuticals and the Death of Art )

:: note :: . . . this idea first took hold during my teens with David Cooper and R.D. Laing . . . The Grammar of Living dedicated to the mad poets and the poetic madmen was a cherished read . . . went to the bookshelf to hold the now yellowing pages & found others :

"There is no hope
There is only permanent struggle
That is our hope
That is a first sentence
In the language of madness".
(The Language of Madness)

:: note :: . . . still thinking about dance & meaning . . . the meaning of the movement is not inside like a kernal . . .but outside . . . enveloping the space . . . like a glow brings out a haze . . .

Freeflow dance theater company . . . Dreamscape . . . program suggests "images on the periphery of your thoughts" . . . it was much more . . . a fascinating juxtaposition of two periods the '95 and the '05 season with a delightful interlude . . . Half Naked, Same Time, and a small piece of sky from '95 had a deep concentrated aesthetic purity . . . tight angst driven compositions . . . sketches centered on an invisible trace of a narrative line transformed into evocative tone poems . . . precise yet playful . . .

Navros and to dream. . . the pieces premiered at this years Her-icane GoDive Festival are sweeping dramatic operas . . . each a distinctive ensemble work broad and theatrical . . . almost baroque in character . . .

Seamambo is the interlude . . . choreographed and danced solo by Kyle Syverson . . . engaging Cuban-African rhythms . . . fluid gestures dissolve into sensual twists danced with an internal grace . . . a fresh wind over the warm sea . . .

all the dancers perform with a controlled athletic passion and trace patterns of shifting intensity with ease . . . J. Latendresse, artistic director and choreographer works with young and experienced dancers alike sharing her vision with what seems to be a quiet confidence and assuredness . . . the energy and emotion Karla Kloeble, the single presence in each piece defines the strength of the program . . . discipline, care and a hunger . . . a hunger to maneuver into the dreamscape . . . a contemporary place which may be mistakenly thought to be at the periphery but actually lies at the heart of the matter . . .

Ten years & ten followed by ten more equal a lifeline . . . Freeflow streaming into the future with fine fortune . . .

"Visual artist Drew Harris inhabits an important musical landmark in Toronto: the penthouse apartment at 110 St. Clair Avenue West, where pianist Glenn Gould lived most of his adult life. . . some of the paintings inspired by Glenn Gould's recordings and compositions."(CBC Radio | Sounds like Canada)

:: note :: . . . don't want to suggest the above work was inspired by Gould . . . just that artists seek spaces . . . spaces seek artists . . .

"In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other."(Wangari Maathai [^] Nobel Lecture)

:: note :: . . . the four practices of Open Space via Parking Lot advances a precise practice to shift into this new level of consciousness . . . read it & implement the ways . . .

"The hybrid figure of Nietzsche's imagining--at once poet, actor, and spectator--is such a lyrist: a poet in the world, a performer of flesh and blood, and an observer, conscious of himself in his turns."(Postmodern culture|Poet, Actor, Spectator)

Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts (Download PDF Now (925KB)) "Is there a Better case for the Arts" (The Blog Debate)

"A true sense of mission, in my opinion, comes from within."(re: A Matter of Relationships | comment posted by Thom Pease )

:: note :: . . . a debate on the place of arts . . . there is no debate for from time to time I am able to focus the work in a way that breathes life into life itself . . . keeping an intimate contact with the mystery which lies at the heart of living . . .

:: note :: . . . started as a biblical reference . . . a post-modern brand cleansing . . . podblogcast . . .

"It's what diarists and documentarians and photographers and personal web site authors do: capture and shelf. It's a way to move on without losing a memory, to collect souvenirs of a moment. After my father died I became obsessed with documenting everyone in my life, for fear of losing them and becoming unable to conjure their voice, their facial expressions, in my mind again. But sometimes, shelving for the future steals the present, shifts your attention from seeing to capturing."(Scribbling.net|Document, disconnect)

:: note :: . . . mark & meaning . . . the attention shifts to mark consciousness & create meaning . . . the foolishess of expecting documentation to preserve memory . . . the marking may be a process of seeing : facing reality . . . we usually see what our needs allow us to see . . . we usually see along our own ways . . . the way becomes a rut - a tendancy to structure according to our own perceptual & emotional frameworks . . . the marking is a deliberate seeing with freshness & clarity . . . facing . . . Mark meaning . . .

. . with apologies to gapingvoid.com

"What do we want? I think we want self-determination - the possibility of creating our own lives, the assumption of our own humanity. This means collective self-determination, just because what we do is so tightly integrated with what others do. The drive to collective self-determination should be the guiding principle, the utopian star that lights up our questions and our experiments. That means, of course, an anti-state politics, not in the sense of having nothing at all to do with the state (which would be very difficult for most of us), but in the sense of recognizing that the state is a form of social organization which negates self-determination."(InterActivist Info Exchange|"Walking we ask questions: An interview with John Holloway from the Fall issue of "Perspectives on Anarchist Theory")

:: note :: . . . thinking about Yeat's celebrated lines . . .

Whatever flames upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has fed

"you will not believe this. i was in firenze waiting to leave for poland. it was heavy snow and freezing today in firenze very unusual. i wanted to stay inside so i went to the pizzeria across the street from the train station. 3 men came and took my back pack. I lost my passport, american student visa, student card, bus ticket for poland... fortunately the credit card with my wallet was in my pocket so i did not lose it. i went to the police office but they did not care much. they made me report the theft and that was it. i could not go to poland because the bus-travel office said that i needed my passport to cross the border."(personal email)

"i went to the korean consulate this morning. it was a long way by bus. i think it took almost over 2 hours. korean consulate officers were very nice to me. while i was explaining what happened in firenze, one lady asked my name and said that she got a call from firenze. they found my bag with my passport. s has my bag now in firenze. the police in firenze contaced to s and he took care of it."(email update)

:: note :: . . . thirty years ago the same thing happened to me in Italy . . . exactly . . . everything stolen & 24 hours later all returned . . . a student travelling alone can be dangerous . . . so focused on the studies one lets the guard down and . . . yet travelling without money means you have almost nothing others want . . .

"The company has become the American theater's most inspired and articulate interpreter of an age in which machines mediate between the perceiver and the perceived, between subject and object. In its productions of the last 15 years in particular, it has increasingly specialized in ravishing, meticulous marriages of live and recorded performance that make it shatteringly clear reality ain't what it used to be."(NYTimes|The Wooster Group: An Ensemble Tailor-Made for an Age of Anxiety)

:: note :: . . . a remarkable ensemble working within a remarkable tradition . . .