He is among the most mythologized of artists: the tortured, mad, solitary, ignored genius. As if his paintings are not striking enough, the severed ear and suicide color them more strangely in this cartoon world. This calm and excellent volume is the antidote, as well as a revelatory look at the heart of his work. […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
Cue the Filthy Muppets
Avenue Q, a much-praised 2003 musical that’s still running in Manhattan, is currently onstage at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka with a superior production. The individual singing and acting is flawless. The group singing, thanks to musical director Molly Severdia, is excellent. Kudos as well to director, costume, video and puppet designer Rae Robison, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Lone Survivors: How We Came To Be The Only Humans On Earth
There’s an illustration I recall from an old schoolbook that still defines the popular conception of human evolution (at least for those who believe in it at all). It depictes a progression of primates, hairy apes becoming slightly less hairy and more two-legged until the crouching Neanderthals become the modern human, upright and standing tall, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Legend of the Falls
I remember my mother standing at an ironing board in the motel room where our family was staying on a vacation trip in the summer of 1960, as we heard the radio report of what came to be called “the miracle at Niagara”: a 7-year-old boy had been swept over the titanic Horseshoe Falls and […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Wedding Ring Tone
Classic farce involves people running in and out of a lot of doors. There are multiple deceptions and discoveries, and a frantic frenzy to manage a situation that is obviously and hilariously already out of control. But a large chunk of today’s reality is virtual, and the opening and closing of doors often involves key […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Play Ball
Back in the 1950s, when baseball really was the national pastime, the New York Yankees ruled. With Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, etc., they usually won the American League and the World Series. So a 1954 novel called The Year The Yankees Lost the Pennant was about Joe Boyd, a frustrated middle-aged fan of […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Psychology’s Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back
Contemporary psychological research is too flawed in its premises and procedures to really prove what it says it proves. So it may provide an errant basis for diagnoses and treatments, or the grand explanations of human thought and behavior derived from it, perhaps as expressed in such books as Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Thinking, Fast and Slow
How does the human mind work? Each publishing season unleashes another cascade of books addressing that subject from a wide array of perspectives. This recent one got a lot of attention, partly because the author won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision-making. Based on an experimental psychological approach, Kahneman’s premise […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Much “I Do”
The production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing now on stage at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka is light on its feet. The action and the language move swiftly and intelligibly. There are basically two stories to tell: the melodramatic tale of false accusations made against a noble’s daughter that disrupts one love affair, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives
The novel arose with the literate middle class that it was designed to please and ultimately to reflect. From its beginnings in the 17th and 18th century it was the most egalitarian of literary forms, mashing up everything from the high art of epic poetry and the high aspirations of religious texts to the common […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Don’t Bogart That Script
It’s been disturbingly like summer though it’s actually only March. Meanwhile Dell’Arte is starting to prepare this summer’s Mad River Festival show, which is going to be — last summer’s Mad River Festival show. Only different. And the difference may be — you. “Mary Jane: The Musical was the biggest grossing show in a single […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Searching for Utopia: The History of An Idea
When I saw this book displayed at Northtown Books, it reminded me that while the once promising field of future studies has waned, there’s a curious new interest in utopia studies. In this era of dire predictions and popular fictions of apocalyptic futures it seems counterintuitive, but it is precisely in dark times that utopian […]