Tragedy, comedy, musical, historical-pastoral and all possible combinations crowd the stage, but one old standby — the thriller, the suspense drama — has mostly been ceded to movies and television, which have more ways to scare people. That’s the conundrum faced by Ferndale Rep in presenting the thriller Wait Until Dark, opening this Thursday (Feb. […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
Fatal Attraction
One of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, Romeo and Juliet, is deceptively difficult to stage. One production I saw at Stratford, Ontario, presented a sparkling surface. The most recent Oregon Shakespeare Festival version illuminated the story. The 1968 Zeffirelli film best portrayed the violent context. Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 movie used post-modern wit to focus the star-crossed […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Simulation and Its Discontents
Daily life is being reshaped so rapidly and extensively by quickly pervasive new technologies that experienced perspective is correspondingly crucial. With The Second Self in 1984, Sherry Turkle established herself as a trenchant observer and analyst of the personal computer’s effects on people, and perhaps more importantly, as a deft writer on the subject. In […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Conservation Refugees: The 100-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples
The current discussions between North Coast tribes and California state government about applying the Marine Life Protection Act, and the concerns stemming from the state ending a Sonoma County tribe’s access to a new marine reserve, are not isolated incidents. According to author Mark Dowie, conflicts between environmental protections and indigenous peoples are worldwide. Citing […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Keep It Simple
Theatre is hard to do, in the best of times — even without economic hardships affecting box office and production decisions. There are multiple challenges and pitfalls in every show. There may be more drama backstage than on — as I’m told occurred at one local theatre this past year: a lead actor’s significant other […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Best Technology Writing 2009
Like a lot of writing on technology in the past couple of decades, Steven Johnson makes a good point and then overreaches. In his introduction to these pieces from Web sites and magazines (Wired, Discover, Atlantic, Technology Review, New Yorker), he points out that most of them are about the present, while tech writing has […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Culture
Self and Society is an oddly vanilla title for the guy who wrote At the Edge of History, Evil and World Order, Coming Into Being and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light. William Irwin Thompson burst on the scene in the early 1970s as a counter-cultural intellectual and later a boundary-crossing New Age synthesist […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Scrooge Groove
What did Christmas mean to Charles Dickens? Singing, dancing, feasting, games, good works and, for some reason, ghosts. He wrote at least 10 ghost stories involving Christmastime, the most famous being A Christmas Carol. Given commedia’s attraction to the grotesque, these Christmas ghosts would seem a natural focus for this year’s holiday show from Dell’Arte, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Thick in Dickens
What the Dickens is going on around here? North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka is currently staging a relatively faithful version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and this coming weekend Dell’Arte opens A Commedia Christmas Carol, while Ferndale Repertory Theatre opens Oliver! – the musical version of Dickens’ Oliver Twist. All while a "performance capture" […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Generosity
Several reviewers of Richard Powers’ last novel (including Margaret Atwood in the New York Times, me in the San Francisco Chronicle) lamented that his recognition in the form of major awards was long overdue. The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark were among the deserving, while his 2003 opus The Time of […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Brogue Wave
Movies about movies, plays about plays, movies about plays and plays about movies: They’re seductive halls of mirrors, spangled with cultural reflections and refractions, and ready-made metaphors about reality and illusion. There’s the fascination of what is on the screen or stage versus what goes on backstage, and the built-in theatricality of the characters: producers, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia
The word "village" tastes like sausage, and Cincinnati like cinnamon rolls. The letter "A" is bright yellow, and female. The key of C sounds green, and irritating. The smell of peaches is spherical. The days of the week are each a different color, arrayed in a twisting shape with a smooth surface, superimposed on the […]