The 10th anniversary of 9/11 got the media’s full attention this past weekend. News outlets offered new information and new surmises concerning those terrible events. Also last weekend, a play that centers on 9/11 opened at Redwood Curtain in Eureka. Yankee Tavern by Steven Dietz is set in a New York City bar five […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
What Marshall McLuhan did in analyzing the meaning of 1960s media, Peter Lunenfeld does for the electronic media of 2011 — chiefly the computer and the Internet. Like McLuhan, he coins or adapts catchy new expressions for his concepts, like “unimodernism,” “unfinish,” “web n.0,” “info-triage,” “bespoke futures.” He also develops his ideas in cultural and […]
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September Songs, Dramas, Stories and Clowns
Redwood Curtain takes a break from comedy to stage Yankee Tavern, a contemporary thriller by American playwright Steven Dietz with political overtones and a spectacular conspiracy theory. “Every one of us who read it, just could not put it down until the end,” said Redwood Curtain Artistic Director Clint Rebik. “With its subject matter, it […]
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Senex and Puer
“James Hillman is an artist of psychology,” wrote Thomas Moore, introducing his selection of Hillman’s writings, A Blue Fire. As director of studies at the Jung Institute and in his articles and books from the 1960s through the ’80s, Hillman became the most prominent American interpreter of Carl G. Jung, as well as an original […]
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Galileo’s Dream
As a fan of his science fiction and near-future fiction (the Mars trilogy, Three Californias, Science in the Capital) I’ve been reluctant to tackle Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternate histories. But I started this, his latest novel, and more than 500 pages later I finished it, wondering what my problem was. Part of my reluctance was […]
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The Great Disruption
Our first truly human evolutionary test was whether we could anticipate the future catastrophe we were blindly causing, and act effectively in time to prevent it. Well, we flunked that one. Like other recent books on the climate crisis, this one asserts that the global catastrophe is unstoppable. Gilding, a Australian former human rights and […]
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Brave Shave
The stage is crowded and full of shadows as the current and very impressive Ferndale Repertory Theatre production of Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street begins. A thin haze that extends over the seats greets the audience returning for the second act: It symbolizes not the romantic London fog, but the mid-19th century […]
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The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World
“If we had a transnationally shared, believable picture of the cosmos, including a mythic-quality story of its origins and our origins — a picture recognized as equally true for everyone on this planet — we humans would see our problems in an entirely new light, and we would almost certainly solve them.” That’s the urgent […]
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Con Artistry
The sunny Riviera is a real place. In fact, there are two (not counting the hotel in Vegas or the club in Manhattan): the beaches and casinos of the French Riviera and the Italian Riviera. But there is also the unreal Riviera, bordered in time by the 1920s of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the 1950s […]
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Cooked
Back before widespread air conditioning, people left the cities for the cooler countryside in summer. So when the Connecticut town of Westport saw its population increase by half in the summer months, a couple of entrepreneurial members of the Theatre Guild found a big old barn where they could produce shows and enticed New York […]
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August Musicals and Makeovers
Opening Friday, Aug. 5, at the Ferndale Repertory Theatre is the Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler musical Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. With its implications of cannibalism, this groundbreaking tale of a murderous barber and complicit purveyor of meat pies was controversial when it opened on Broadway in 1979. But it won […]
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The Lost Art of Happiness
In The Great Disruption, Paul Gilding foresees that the onrushing climate crisis in combination with resource depletion and other factors will create catastrophes that force major changes, including (and especially) the transition to a no-growth, steady-state world economy. So in such a society, what will replace material acquisition and the joy of shopping as the […]