Diversionary Tactics

The core question of politics is not "What should be done?" but rather "What should people be forced to do, and who has the right to force them?"

There are any number of defensible answers to this question, and there will never be a consensus on what answer is the best.  But let's at least stop wasting each other's time by pretending we're talking about something else.

Sunset, Midtown

Breaking onto 34th Street,
The wild sun,
Majestic in its dying,
Splashes a tender, violent orange
Over the pale cafés.

Above the Hudson,
The sky has split wide open;
It bleeds color.
Men become shadows
As they tread the rails of the crosswalks,
Cut out in stately black
Against a furious dusk.

Lights flare on.
Somber women bring coffee.
Night settles in around us,
Warm and expected as a shroud.

Don't Just Make – Make Something

What I've realized is, I don't love music; I love songs.  And I don't love theater; I love plays.  And I don't love cinema; I love movies.  And I don't love sequential art; I love comic books.

Basically, I'm far less interested in art forms than I am in what people do with them.

A Puzzlement Regarding the Avant-Garde

To my mind, the perfect piece of avant-garde theater is Stomp. It has no story, no characters, no dialogue, no conventional dramatic structure. It's pure theater. It's a celebration of rhythm and movement for their own sake.

And it works. It works like gangbusters. It's never boring; it's never artsy or pretentious; it's visceral and exciting and life-affirming and even funny. It's the kind of show you walk out of feeling grateful. It's an experience worth having. It's worth having more than once.

The funny thing is, I've never heard any advocate of avant-garde theater mention Stomp as a point of reference. If it comes up at all among theater insiders, it's spoken of dismissively, or even with contempt. I can only assume this is because it's too popular. After all, if a lot of people like it, then it can't really be art.