I awake to a cloudy autumn morning 15 stories above the heart of Toronto's Arts District. I am a bit tired from an all-night event called La Nuit Blanche. Fashioned after the original exhibition in Paris, La Nuit Blanche is a citywide spectacle where local citizens and tourists take over the closed-off streets of Toronto to enjoy a seemingly endless collection of large contemporary-art installations.

What I find myself reflecting on, however, is neither the event nor the contemporary art at the center of it. Rather, it is the group of new friends who spontaneously gathered to share the experience, as well as the realization of how incredibly interconnected the seemingly different paths of my journey and work have become. I believe it is this unique combination of differentiation and intersection that makes my life experience most relevant.

The group of friends included a national art curator, two of the world's leading physicists, a local businessman, an immigrant from war-torn Serbia, and two young French girls, ages 8 and 11. Our challenge, other than defying sleep, was to keep up with the highly charged and overly curious young girls. The massive art exhibition could have just as easily come under the heading of the world's largest outdoor science fair. Like a science fair, it was filled with contemporary installations and experiential exhibits by creative pioneers trying to communicate their interpretations of the world to the greater public. Many of the presentations looked more like inventions than art to me.

Just the day before, I was standing right in the middle of an actual science fair called the BrainStem Festival, about two hours outside Toronto, in Waterloo. Hundreds of wide-eyed high-school students were running about, exploring and experiencing a set of installations and interactive exhibits. This time, however, the hosts and creators called themselves "scientists" instead of "artists." The event was held inside the great halls of the Perimeter Institute (PI), the world's leading theoretical-physics research and training center, under the leadership of another new friend of mine, Neil Turok.

I had just come from lunch with Neil, prior to which we had hosted a dozen other inspired visionaries in an exploratory roundtable on the deeper meaning of and the relationship between music, science and creativity. In attendance were the same art curator, the father of the French girls and the physicists with whom I had attended the art exhibition the other night, and who would later unexpectedly reappear together again at Le Nuit Blanche. Also in attendance were other distinguished scientists, writers, composers, artists, faculty members of PI, a philanthropist, an opera singer and the director of the African Institute for Math and Sciences (AIMS). Just as I had been privileged to do with several other thought leaders from around the globe earlier in my intensive three-day visit to PI, we drew upon our vastly different areas of expertise and experience. Fueled by our collective passion and shared worldview, we pushed the boundaries of Perimeter to explore and create new paradigms for helping humanity prepare for, adapt to and embrace the future challenges and opportunities ahead. Going back into the future again, we looked deeply into the transformation of education or, as we prefer to reframe it, "the learning experience."

Rewinding to 48 hours earlier, my first day at PI, I was invited to participate in the "WGSI Summit 2030: The Future of Education." Once again, a group of experts and innovators from a wide variety of disciplines around the globe came together to lay the framework for the optimal learning experiences that could help a child born today be best prepared to enter the world when they graduate from high school 18 years in the future.

Although the time bending, discipline mixing, and theoretical play on connectivity at these various events had seemed somewhat confusing, it now felt incredibly relevant and appropriate standing in the center of the PI, the world's leading center for the study of quantum physics.

Although I had no way to predict what my experience in this time capsule would be, I was there with a purpose. My goal was to help key players in science and education better understand the values and essential role that music and creativity have in fulfilling our collective vision of fostering the well-being of humanity and cultivating a more intelligent, creative and compassionate global citizenry.

It was both refreshing and inspiring to exchange with so many leaders in science and education who share a common worldview and a deep passion for and commitment to helping us realize it. It also became even clearer to me that when we let go of the silos and schools of thought that too often divide us, we can easily agree on how essential it is to build a stronger bridge between the art of science and the science of music and creativity. In each of the conversations I engaged in at PI and the exhibitions, we were able to identify that creativity and emotional engagement are at the heart of more evolved levels of communication, learning and social advancement. It is profound what can happen when the presumably different components of the human orchestra start to sing the same song.

If you would like to experience this blog post complete with images, you may do so by viewing it on the EarthTones website.

For more on music and education by Frank Fitzpatrick and WHY Music, click here.

For more by Frank Fitzpatrick, click here.

Three great British directors Christopher Nolan, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach explore the relationship between filmmaking and painting for Tate's new video series. Find out which artist inspired The Joker's smeared make-up in The Dark Knight, how Turner's sketches are being brought to the big screen, and what the camera can learn from Hogarth...

How the Joker got his smile



The Joker, played by Heath Ledger in the film The Dark Knight, has to be one of the most chilling villains to have emerged from comic books onto the screen. When I interviewed Christopher Nolan in Los Angeles, he showed me how he'd used paintings by Francis Bacon as the source reference for the Joker's make-up, and told me why, when words can't adequately convey an idea, he often turns to art to help shape his creative vision.

Bringing Turner to life



For Mike Leigh, JMW Turner has always been an art hero. Taking time out from shooting his new feature about Turner's life and work, he visited Tate Britain to look at some of Turner's sketches in detail, and explained how he is painstakingly recreating some of the scenes in them for the cinema.

What Hogarth knew about people



Ken Loach is known for his social realist directing style, so its no surprise that he's an admirer of William Hogarth's down-to-earth portraits and satires. Loach is currently completing what may be his last feature film, Jimmy's Hall, a period drama set in 1930s Ireland. Walking around the gallery at Tate Britain, he talks about what he's learnt from Hogarth, and why, as an artist or filmmaker, you need to be an outsider.

These films are part of a series in which leading creatives choose artworks from Tate Britain's collection that have inspired them. You can watch more on Tate's website.

This is the third in a series on artists using computer generated imaging (CGI) and 3D-simulation modeling, the source for special effects imaging in mainstream films, video gaming and advertising.

See Part 1 of this series, Projecting the Future of Painting in Claudia Hart's 3D Utopian eScapes, and Part 2, Matthew Weinstein: When the Revolution Comes, It Will Be a 3D Animation Entertainment With Art Merchandizing.

CORE-IB2012-4min from Kurt Hentschläger on Vimeo.

With two November 2013 installations opening the same day -- one at the Paris Nemo Festival and one at the United Arab Emirates' Sharjah Art Foundation -- the reputation of Kurt Hentschlaeger, the Austrian new media visionary now based in Chicago, continues to expand globally. For two decades, Hentschlaeger has been pushing international audiences toward newly-traced boundaries between the synthetic and the natural phenomena alluded to too often and too vaguely as the sublime. Although conventionally called an audio-visual artist, the nomenclature is inadequate for a polysensory maestro who, along with Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, and Olafur Eliasson, is to the installation art of the new millennial generation what Caspar David Friederich and William Blake were to the Romantic movement in 18th and 19th-century painting -- a frontiersman of sensory augmentation.





But whereas the Romantics saw themselves as ushering audiences to the precipice from which transcendental realms of ecstatic and spiritual rapture could be accessed, Hentschlaeger introduces audiences -- or more accurately, his performative-participants of our more materialist and pragmatic age -- to a full array of physical/virtual experiences conceived of as continuous and unbounded phenomenological infinitudes. Hentschlaeger is currently touring ZEE, a spatial-theatrical installation that is both audience-performative and experiential as a full touch-sense immersion into synthetic mists rhythmically timed to strobes of light. Besides Paris and Sharjah, ZEE has enveloped audiences at the Museum of New and Old Art at Hobart, Tasmania, Australia; the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (Fact), in Liverpool; the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; the File Festival, São Paulo; the Wave Exhibition, INDAF, Seoul; the Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh; and FuturePerfect, in New York.

The universality of Hentschaeger's media language accounts for his popularity throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as the language of his sensory-environmental installations in particular are both sub-linguistic and sub-semiotic. By this I mean the artist synthesizes an experiential primordiality that heightens our awareness to a devolutionary state of awareness before sight was made the primary, directive sense of animal existence, along with our own, all-too-human distraction from our less-developed, external senses for touch, taste and smell.





Not that the participants in Hentschlaeger's immersive installations have their vision entirely closed off. Upon entering the synthetic mists of his bounded environment, ZEE, sight is merely diminished in capacity so that touch, and to a lesser extent the senses of smell and taste, and even sensation of our internal organs and their vital functions (pulse, pressure. breath, perspiration, temperature) are heightened to a ratio equivalent with sight and hearing. For some participants the heightening is so precipitously disorienting that Hentschlaeger has to issue warnings about the dangers to entrants prone to seizures. It's not rare that people have to be escorted out of his womb-like returns, though more often because of the anxiety that so intimates an awareness with one's own body than any physical danger. Less frequently, the strobes trigger epileptic seizures in participants suffering from photosensitivity.





Hentschlaeger is also circulating a corpus of 3D animation video installations that boldly convert old-age mytho-metaphysical models of a transmigratory "ectoplasmic" variety of life force at the edge of some virtual-electromagnetic spectrum. Throughout 2012, Hentschlaeger's CORE, a 3D animation, five-channel video projection installation, was shown in the London 2012 Festival coinciding with the Summer Olympics, where it startled and captivated audiences both for its bold spectacle of virtual fantasia and its metaphysical implications as a commentary on human behavior. After having blackened a cavernous 19th-century engine shop at the Ironbridge George Museum in Shropshire, England -- a historical preservation site renowned as one of the earliest centers of the Industrial Revolution -- Hentschlaeger projected a quintet of videos depicting large-scale "swarms" of virtual, faceless humanoid drones engaged in an enthralling hive-like flight -- one weightlessly synchronized as a ballet of perpetual convergence and dispersal. Instead of evoking the spectral souls of wishful faiths and myths, Hentschlaeger's humanoid swarm mindlessly scatters and converges in formation as if the figures collectively, yet intricately, demarcate a living, breathing universe -- perhaps the kind imaginably endowed as an anthropomorphic prime mover or force. In this, the clustering movement of the collective is more evocative of a school of fish, flock of birds or herd of animals, impelled by a common instinct or constraint, than a race of Homo Sapiens imbued with free will.





The effect of seeing an aerial choreography virtually performed by a cluster of human forms so devoid of individualism and choice is at the same time rapturous and profoundly disturbing for its suggestion of a perpetual afterlife or eternal utopia outside space-time and premised on absolute submission and subjugation. When considered against the real historical backdrop of 19th-century capitalist industrialization and consumerism specific to Ironbridge, the work pointedly takes on moral and political implications in its modeling of a single-purposed communality analogous to human worker drones sustaining a dangerously totalitarian or oligarchical power.

CORE is the culmination of a body of 3D virtual video projections the artist has shown since 2000 in such settings as The Venice Biennale, The National Art Museum of China in Beijing, The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, PS1-Clocktower in New York, and The Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal. In 2010, Hentschlaeger also received the prestigious QWARTZ Electronic Music Award in Paris. I asked Hentschlaeger to summarize what he'd intended to convey with the provocative virtual imagery of clustering bodies.





"I think the clustering-bodies body of work can be described analogously as unconscious bodies in a kind of Neverland, in-between state. There is a body of work now with four individual pieces: CLUSTER, which is a single screen live show, projected improvisationally (with me on hand controllers) that dates from 2010-2012. Then there is HIVE, which is a stereoscopic, single-screen installation from 2011. CORE, at Ironbridge, is my 2012 "symphonic" installation with five individual groups on five separate screens, each consisting of 23 bodies in projection format. And there is MATTER, a site specific composition for the new dome at the Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal, which opened May 30, 2012. I plan to do one other piece, called KOMA, with several screens and groups of bodies, in a surround setup, each group with a smaller number of bodies, rather than the 23 bodies that CORE features per screen." 

CORE is essentially a work about unconsciousness in ways confrontational with the most basic and blatant audience presumptions concerning spirituality and mysticism. It's possible to see in CORE the same devotional reach for exalted human nature that William Blake sought in his search for the divine. It's an association that, in fact, Hentschlaeger encourages with the work's 2012 installment in Ironbridge, an English town that has preserved its Victorian legacy and ties to the romantic movement of which Blake was a part. Conversely, what can be described as a depiction of a single-minded attraction to a central magnetic and radiant force seems in accord with the definition some mystics and faithful have for spirituality as a letting go of all personal will and desire in a submission to a higher being and purpose. 




CORE's audience was largely on hand to see the Summer Olympics, and as such Hentschlaeger found them to be comprised of greater diversity than the crowds who descend on the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and all the many international art biennials. The difference here is substantial: the great majority of people drawn to the Olympics or to Ironbridge's history weren't art-world-savvy, and thereby the issue of spiritual interpretation had the potential of becoming a thorny thicket. But Hentschlaeger, who doesn't personally subscribe to religion or spiritualism, anticipated this in his initial conceptualization of CORE.

"Spirituality is a problematic label," he told me. "I'm a nonbeliever in ideas of deities and higher powers. Reflecting on mysticism comes more easily, or at least the aspects of it that relate to states of consciousness -- aspects of reality, beyond normal human perception. The limits and malleability of human perception is one of my key areas of interest and extends to ideas of what can and can't be perceived and whether the unknown can be understood more than just as a concept, and beyond that can render anything but imaginary constructs, such as belief-based systems. In regards to my pseudo physics-driven work with virtual bodies, when I say that they are 'unconscious,' even this is misleading in that they have really no consciousness whatsoever as mere ephemeral constructs without ego, will, desire, emotions."

"Then again," he goes on, "being an art creation, they are informed by my own existence, ideas and will. And most of these ideas orbit around issues of technologically-induced fantasies of omni-control and omnipotence. So these floating bodies are initially empty vessels, free of ego and also individuality, particles rather than beings. It's just by their humanoid form and motion that we connect to them and project onto them subjectively. But also, the way that they move and cluster together in virtual zero gravity invokes historical references to angels, disembodied spirits, drifting souls, etc."

Hentschlaeger then brought the discussion back to the structures that underpin all his work: "Coming back to our contemporary obsession with control, functioning, managing, structuring, compartmentalizing, and the consequentially-inflicted orgy of material possessions (or in popular neurological terms-the dominance of left brain hemisphere processing), I find our civilization's craving for infinite comfort and control (of life inside and outside of ourselves) futile and ultimately prone to leading to the opposite of our desires. We are all being controlled by our drives and desires. I'm not advocating a dystopian model here, but rather am interested in a 'hyper-civilization' based on a historical process of emancipation from ancient belief systems. On the one end, it does engage the mystical 'complex' to connect to the larger unknown outside of oneself and transcending one's own prison of body and ego, while on the other side it still subscribes to rational thought and thus acknowledges the obvious duality of being both a discrete quasi-autonomous being as well as a particle within a mass. I have to add that, as a consequence of being 'ideologically non-committal,' the prototypical connoisseur of the romantic sublime tends to stay in a safe, albeit non-ironic distance, and thus very much remains locked into a position of observing rather than participating in the dangers of life."





The seed for Hentschlaeger's "floating body" oeuvre was planted when he designed a modest projection video and set design for the Paris Ballet Preljocajas. Commisioned by the company's choreographer, Angelin Preljocaj, the dance was called N, the simple letter that is the abbreviation for 'haine', the french word for hate. The dance enacts "hell on earth", according to Hentschlaeger, meaning "what happens when we lose control over our bodies." In accord with this theme, Hentschlaeger's first figurative animation paired real dancers with virtual bodies. In fact it was through the choreography that Hentschlaeger had come to know of the impetus for his future animated projections, and fittingly. For as any dancer can tell us, choreography demands that dancers submit to the designs of a tyrannical overseer, not succumb to a freer improvisation from within. 

It was a new experience for Hentschlaeger to work with dancers, but not with human bodies. Throughout the 1990s, Hentschlaeger recorded and projected real human subjects representing a range of psychological and perceptual conditions that heighten our perception of the dehumanizing effects of media on modern life. With N, Hentschlaeger came back to representing bodies, but now they are virtual bodies, animations. The special effects of animation allow the artist to manipulate virtual bodies in ways not afforded to him by real living subjects photographed. In so doing, Hentschlaeger learned how the forces that he analogizes theatrically, in real life impact upon real bodies, while pushing, accelerating, intensifying the desired effects on these bodies in ways unacceptable in interactions with real subjects.





Hentschlaeger also has a media source for the floating bodies oeuvre. "In the research informing N," he told me, "I looked into computer game engines, which are the realtime animation software backbones of any computer game. I was particularly interested in shooter games and war simulators, for both their viscerally entertaining simulations of combat and killing, and for their banal brutality and mass slaughtering of virtual opponents from the comfort of one's chair. The plan was to use the realtime of such software as a model for interacting intuitively with a choreographer and dancers and to build on the virtual physics algorithms employed to create a more lifelike simulation of human motion."

"Unreal Tournament, the game engine I based my first floating bodies generation on, had one outstanding micro feature that caught my attention. On the death of 'a combatant', the body sinks to the ground, starts convulsing, jerking, and then dissolving into particles to instantly spawn a virtual reincarnation. It is upon having been killed in the game that I found the moment of 'losing control,' whereby the convulsing body drifts off, to be the only body that seems truly human and touching in an otherwise redundant, superficial world."





This convulsing, out-of-control body resurfaced unintentionally, and with "a spooky twist", a few years after, when, in one of Hentschlaeger's early immersive works using strobes and fog, the strobes triggered a participant's epileptic seizures due to his photosensitivity to light. In this sense, the loss of control was as much existentially forced on Hentschlaeger as it was an intended and continuous thread of both his figurative projection videos and his immersive environments, ZEE, where particpants must slowly feel their way through a thick mist. "When we find ourselves amid the synthetic mist and strobes of ZEE, we have the experience of losing all reference points perceptually, almost physically. I say almost physically because we retain the experience of feeling the floor beneath us, and the awareness of our own bodies, but little if anything else. We can't see or hear anything of substance. And then, there are those visitors who lose even these physical references and have to be ushered out of ZEE."

Whereas the immersive work imposes a substantial loss of perceptual and physical control, the projected virtual domain presents an analogical loss of control that tells us about art's propensity to reaffirm experience rather than to challenge it. Hentschlaeger admits that his fascination with the loss of control trauma links to a primal narcissistic injury inflicted on us despite all the insights, knowledge, efforts, accomplishments of our technologically-addicted civilization. "There is no way out of the basic human trajectory which always ends in our demise. I stick with my suspicion, that most of our technological obsession orbits around our desire for heightened control of our lives, specifically through attaining stability, longevity, and ultimately the promise of transcending (read: continuing) our destiny on this planet rather than in whatever mythological scenarios beyond."





"My life from early on was rich in death. When I was eight years old, my father died. Until I passed my father's age of death, I had no doubt that I wouldn't live long, and in hindsight I often behaved accordingly. I collected a fair share of near-death experiences on an almost regular basis during my twenties and thirties, some of which I still can't quite grasp why I survived them. In my feeling of living on the 'edge of a precipice,' I acutely remember feeling things being washed out of my hands, finding myself as much in an observer's position as struggling for a way out."

"All of this informs my early virtual bodies installations KARMA and FEED. For these, I developed virtual bodies that not only move and navigate entirely through convulsions, but also define the range of possible motions and aesthetics of the work. The result is a staged virtual black box lit by strobing virtual lights. The lights help us to visualize a zero gravity void in which a number of identical clone bodies seemingly interact without recognizing their respective body boundaries when they drift through each other like ghosts."

"After N, from KARMA and FEED on, each virtual body doubles as a sound instrument, creating and shaping sound through motion and changes in position in the zero gravity space. The greater the quantity of virtual bodies in the environment, the more complexly and richly the droning sound builds, creating a synchronized audio-visual impression."





"In 2008, I started a massive overhaul of the animation platform, having reached the limits of the Unreal software. The now finished instrument is allowing for more complexity as I move away from convulsions to focus on a more realistic interaction between individual bodies, swarm behavior, motion patterns, and an overall impression of ephemerality. CORE, the latest, most nuanced and symphonic work in the series, is realized with this platform. It is exceedingly more dynamic in both motion patterns and audio-visual rendering than my earlier works. Like CLUSTER, HIVE, and MATTER, from within the same work group, they are concerned with virtual embodiment of the fleeting, the immaterial, and the aether beyond matter."

The wide media range Hentschlaeger explores brings us to the issue of the audience's interaction with different media and their conventional genres. This is something artists have been doing on a grand scale in an art context since the Fluxus artists of the 1960s (and on a more modest scale since Dada), when kinetics, light, sound, music, performance, film, video, and audience participation extended the parameters of cultural experience. But with the advent of the digital New Media in the last twenty years, the component of audience interactivity--or what the New Media guru Lev Manovich calls The Myth of Interactivity -- has become the subject of scrutiny for being too vaguely conceptualized by artists and critics. And so there has been a push to further articulate the different interactive structures used in the new media object and experience. The trouble is, as Manovich has made much of, it is difficult to theoretically define and describe the user experience of interactive structures and the objects and images that facilitate them. Furthermore, the New Media artists' adoption of conventional media languages -- those of painting, sculpture, writing, theater, and cinema -- are then transposed by those artists insufficiently to digital productions.

"There is a terminological confusion here," Hentschlaeger warns, "as most works tagged as 'interactive' should be rightfully labeled as 'reactive,' which points to a much more simple and rather mechanical process. What I'm saying is that I see interactivity as a complex, intelligent process, something alive, with a good amount of unpredictability and not necessarily an end or set time-space frame. This is what also makes any auratic art work interesting and truly interactive, in that it will trigger a personal response in the viewer, and for that matter as many possibly different responses as there are people in the audience. The response is not even limited to the time spent with the artwork, but can linger in memory and can color lives going forward, as with other intense experiences."





"Of course, the classic art-viewer interaction disallows feedback on, or changes to, the artwork. The beauty of this model is that compelling art is both radiant and static-hermetic. The viewer isn't expected to overtly, physically or dramatically interact with the art work, but enter a solemn, inner and often quite meditative process, in which the artwork, if attractive enough, is quietly devoured and fed into one's fabric of cultural experiences. I agree with Lev Manovich about The Myth of Interactivity, but I doubt that active user participation any day soon will evolve into something as meaningful as what we already have -- and that is a passive viewer/user participation. 'Interactivity' in media art comes with the Myth of Technology, the eternal promise of improving on nature. Short of true artificial intelligence, I don't see how enough intelligent complexity could be rendered to create truly interactive, rather than classically reactive work. We are a conscious, intelligent, sensual and emotional species and tend to get bored quickly because of that nature. To occupy our interest for a longer period of time, objects and processes are required to be challenging, ambiguous, enigmatic, and mysterious, if not mystical -- everything but mechanically predictable." 


Read other posts by G. Roger Denson on Huffington Post in the archive.

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New Work from ROA in Austria, Canada, Great Britain, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the US.

Today we visit with street artist, urban naturalist, and globe trotter ROA to see what walls he has been climbing since we last checked in with him and his curious traveling circus of animals. Alternating between the cuddly and the killing, the endoskelton and the excrement, the pugnacious, playful and the putrefying, this Belgian world citizen is no romantic with his subjects and he isn't asking for you to be either necessarily.


ROA. Lagos, Portugal 2013. (photo © Roa)


If you consider the brutal natural and man-made world that animals have to survive in and the ruthless depravity of humans throughout the ages (including right now), perhaps ROA's depictions of these regionally based creatures are a healthy counterbalance to the fictional storytelling we customarily see in large public depictions of animals. Rotting Big Bird, anyone?


ROA. Lagos, Portugal 2013. (photo © Roa)


In one instructive example, a local town meeting in Chichester in Great Britain erupted into a heated debate this spring and a vote was called over whether to remove one of ROA's fresh paintings from public view. The aerosoled portrait featured a rotting badger lying belly up and pock-marked across the front of a neglected building.

"It's not appropriate, it's grotesque and I hope it will be removed," said the district and parish councilor who was outraged at the factual representation of a dying animal, according to a local website. The article does not mention if she was equally outraged at the culling of badgers locally, which ROA was drawing attention to, or if she would call the culling of undesirable animals "grotesque".


ROA. Ibex at the harbor in Linz, Austria 2013. (photo © Christian Boehm)


You wouldn't cheapen the spray-painted monochromatic realism of ROAs work as activism per se, or even moralizing. Sometimes a bear is just a bear.

But sometimes the poses and positions and selectively illustrated details are more pronounced than one may see in nature, so clearly his desire is to draw attention to them. And why not try to give a voice to them? Otters don't do email and bison hooves are too clunky for texting and nary a narwhal has his own Facebook page. If they have been displaced, marginalized, or are suffering, you won't see a cluster of clamoring squirrels arrayed before a bank of microphones and cameras issuing a press conference.


ROA. Detail. Linz, Austria 2013. (photo © Christina Boehm)


But slowly and gradually and almost systematically the former graffiti artist has been raising the awareness of even the dullest among us bipedal primates that the animals we are sharing the world with are plausibly pissed about that whole "dominion over nature" clause that pious Pulcinellas spout when justifying treating some animals like trash even while their blue-blooded poodles are having pedicures. Now that you think of it, this may not be exclusively about the animal kingdom.

Certainly we have all learned from ROAs travels that nature isn't pretty - and can possibly be very alarming - and he won't likely let you forget it.

So start trotting, galloping, swimming, scurrying, slithering, and scurrying! We have a lot of catching up to do with ROA as this year he's been in Austria, Canada, Great Britain, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the US.


ROA. Linza, Austria 2013. (photo © Christian Bohem)



ROA. Linz, Austria 2013. (photo © Roa)



ROA. Mural Festival. "Still Life With Bison and Bear" Montreal, Canada 2013. (photo © Roa)


This wall was featured in our coverage this summer of the MURAL festival, where we wrote;

"For his first visit to Montreal, the Belgian Street Artist named ROA says that he had a great time creating this 'still life' with a bison and a bear. When talking about his inspiration, ROA says that he was impressed with the history of the so-called American bison, which was incredibly abundant in the early 19th century, numbering more than 40 million.

After being hunted almost into extinction with a population of 200 a century later, the bison slowly have reestablished their numbers in Canada to 700,000. He decided to add a bear laying on top because it tells a similar story of a native mammal in the region."

"This is the first time I actually painted a narwhal," says ROA about the curiously speared whale that lives year-round in the Arctic.

"Their tusks make them a unique example of a species; in a way the narwhal is a mythical sea creature; The unicorns of the sea," explains ROA about this Swedish piece. "The young male narwal that I painted here is unfortunately caught in a fishing line. I wanted to draw attention to how they and many other species become a victim of hunting and pollution."


ROA. "Catch of The Day". Detail. Open Art. Örebro, Sweden 2013. (photo © Roa)



ROA. Vienna, Austria 2013. (photo © Roa)


At the start of July ROA opened his second solo show - this time with Inoperable Gallery in Vienna.

The exhibition was called "PAN-ROA's Box" and it was an animal curiosity focused show.


ROA. Detail. Vienna, Austria 2013. (photo © Roa)



ROA. Wall Therapy. Rochester, NY 2013. (photo © Roa)



ROA. Wall Therapy. Rochester, NY 2013. (photo © Roa)



ROA. "Two Blue Tits" in Chichester, Great Britain 2013. (photo © Roa)


ROA was there as part of his invitation to participate at the Chichester Street Art Festival in May.


ROA. Chichester, Great Britain 2013. (photo © Roa)


Here is the painting referred to above that upset a number of people in Chichester and called for a vote to take it down (it was 50/50 so they've left it up).

Regarding the Badger Cull 2013
"After several emails from Louise Matthews about the upcoming badger cull in GB, I painted a badger to support their efforts to save the badgers," says ROA. The controversial practice in Britain has gained a number of very adamant foes, including Brian May from the rock group Queen.


ROA. Bethenal-Green London 2013. (photo © Roa)


As a guest of Griff from Street Art London, ROA did this piece in Bethenal-Green.


ROA. Nuart 2013. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Roa)



ROA. Malaga, Spain. (photo © Roa)


As part of his invitation to the Maus Festival, ROA painted this in Calle Casas De Campos, Malaga, Spain.


ROA. Malaga, Spain. (photo © Roa)



ROA. "Fighting Squirrels", Southbank, London 2013. (photo © Roa)


"If you have ever witnessed a squirrel fight, you might recognize the action," says ROA of these two enraged fellas in mid air. He explains that when the North American Eastern Grey squirrel (top) was introduced it caused the red native Squirrel (bottom) to lose habitat and population, so now the red one is protected by conservation laws.

ROA would like to thank the Southbank Centre at the canal.


ROA. Dulwich, London 2013. (photo © Roa)



ROA. Baroque The Streets Festival. Dulwich, London 2013. (photo © Roa)


Regarding the dog above, ROA says :
"It took me a detailed search into the Dulwich Picture Gallery to find an animal expression that was involved with the daily life of the time and express on it's own a fragment of the ordinary life. My eye was caught by a pooping dog in a large scale hunting scene; I found that an interesting detail. The people of the museum told me they have more hunting scenes with this same curious detail, but those were currently not exhibited."

Dulwich: 'Baroque The Streets: Dulwich Street Art Festival' May 10-19, 2013. The festival was organized by Street Art London & Dulwich Picture Gallery


ROA. Urban Forms Festival. Lodz, Poland. 2013. (photo © Roa)

Roa wishes to extend his most sincere thanks to the following people:
In Southbank, London he sends thanks to the Southbank Centre at the canal.
In Linz, Austria he says thanks to Bubble Days Festival in Linz, and thanks to Poidle.
In Montreal, he says thanks to MURAL for all their good care and for the retreat in Quebec. Thank you also to Yan, Andre, Alexis and Nico!
In Malaga, Spain he says thank you very much Fer.
In Rochester he says thank you to Ian, Steven, Dan and Wise, who "made my stay excellent as usual."
In Lagos, Portugal he says thanks to LAC Laboratório Actividades Criativas.
In Stavanger, Norway he extends his thanks to the NUART festival.
In Lodz, Poland he says thanks to Michael and the crew.

And we here at BSA say thank you to you all, and of course to ROA for sharing all his travels with BSA readers.

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In 1947, a 21-year-old Ruth Asawa spent a summer in the rural Mexican town of Toluca, where she saw looped wire baskets for sale in a local market. Fascinated by their form, she learned how to make the baskets and, over time, appropriated the technique to create a body of hanging sculptural works that are as much about negative space as about physical objects.



Ruth Asawa/Courtesy of Christie's


"All my wire sculptures come from the same loop," Asawa once said. "And there's only one way to do it. The idea is to do it simply, and you end up with a shape." She often described her modernist wire works, with their emphasis on line, light, and shade, as "drawings in space." Light penetrating their chain mail-like surface casts intricate shadows on surrounding walls like ghostly doubles of the works themselves.

Asawa's passing in August at age 87 came on the heels of an explosive upswing in the market for her unique and long-undervalued works, especially the multilobed sculptures, examples of which sold for $374,500 and $278,500 at Christie's and Sotheby's, respectively, in 2012. Then, at Sotheby's contemporary art day sale on May 15 of this year, Asawa's Untitled S.566 (Hanging Five-lobed Continuous Form with Spheres Inside Each Lobe, Four of the Inside Lobes Contain Spheres Within Them), from 1954, sold for $1,025,000, more than tripling its $300,000 low estimate. That evening at the postwar and contemporary sale at Christie's New York, her Untitled (S.108, Hanging, Six-lobed, Multilayered Continuous Form Within a Form), from the late 1960s, soared well past its estimate of $250,000 to $350,000 to realize $1,443,750-- the current record for the artist. To complement its May sale, Christie's presented "Ruth Asawa: Objects & Apparitions," a month-long exhibition and private offering of 48 sculptures and works on paper, her first New York solo show in 50 years.

Until recently, however, the San Francisco-based sculptor was not widely known beyond the West Coast, and her works commanded relatively little: $1,000 or so for pieces sold during the 1950s and '60s, up to $100,000 for the largest works sold at the turn of the millennium. A breakthrough moment for Asawa's commercial market came in 2006, when Daniell Cornell curated a retrospective of her work at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. "Ruth was ahead of her time in understanding how sculptures could function to define and interpret space," he says. "This aspect of her work anticipates much of the installation work that has come to dominate contemporary art. Although a survey was long overdue, it was timely."

Born in 1926 to Japanese immigrant parents, Asawa grew up on a vegetable farm in Norwalk, California, with six siblings. Shortly after Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, her family was sent to an internment camp on the grounds of the Santa Anita Race Track. There they lived for six months in converted horse stables along with several artists. Asawa would later recount that this was where her art education began. She later completed three years at the Milwaukee State Teachers College but was not able to undertake the required student-teaching year because schools in Wisconsin would not hire a Japanese instructor. This rejection prompted Asawa to enroll at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the summer of 1946. At that time, the faculty of the pioneering and experimental liberal arts school included Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and Jacob Lawrence; Willem de Kooning was a visiting artist, and Robert Rauschenberg was a classmate. It was also there that Asawa met her husband and lifelong companion, architect Albert Lanier.

By the late 1940s, Asawa had joined the San Francisco Women Artists group at the urging of friend Imogen Cunningham to "raise the level of women artists," as Asawa would later recall in Daniel Belasco's 2007 book Between the Waves: Feminist Positions in American Art, 1949-62. While she was certainly conscious of gender inequality in the art world, she never specifically attributed feminist intentions to her craft.

In 1954 Asawa had her first New York solo show at the Peridot Gallery, the same space that had given Louise Bourgeois her first solo sculpture show in 1949. This was followed by two more solos at Peridot, inclusion in the Whitney Museum's annual survey of new art in 1955 (now the biennial), and an invitation to participate in the 1955 São Paulo Art Biennial. Despite these early successes, many critics were quick to characterize Asawa's output as "women's work" or "craft."

"Asawa's work was viewed as a variant of weaving or basket-making for a very long time," says Todd Levin, director of the Levin Art Group and a member of the Association of Professional Art Advisors. "An artist such as Rosemarie Trockel now uses those techniques to great advantage and effect. But in Asawa's time, the art world had just come through de Kooning and Pollock in the 1940s, and these were the gigantic personalities that drove the hypermasculine discourse of the 1950s."

In 1968 Asawa began to focus more on civic engagement than her own practice, joining the San Francisco Arts Commission, where she campaigned for arts education reform. She also cofounded the Alvarado Arts Workshop, an education program that brought professional artists and performers into 50 San Francisco schools. "She found the time and energy required to keep up a gallery reputation to be a distraction from her love of art and her efforts to expand the role of the arts in creating a progressive, inclusive society," explains Cornell, now deputy director for art and senior curator at the Palm Springs Art Museum. "Gradually her works fell out of favor and were stigmatized by the categories of design, craft, and community-based projects."

While Asawa enjoyed respect in the museum world, particularly on the West Coast, and had a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1973, she eventually abandoned commercial gallery shows in favor of making public sculptures. "Selling was not a focus of Asawa's from the mid '60s through the '90s," says Jonathan Laib, a senior specialist in postwar and contemporary art at Christie's, who curated the selling exhibition, noting that she did continue to make wire sculptures, including a single-lobed work around 1990 that looks like those from the 1950s.

Prior to Asawa's 2006 retrospective at the de Young, it was still possible to find and purchase a major hanging work from a private collection for $50,000 to $100,000. After 2006, however, prices rose as auction houses began to reconsider the categorization of Asawa's work. "We took Ruth out of the context of design and placed her in the context of the fine arts alongside other postwar masters, and doing this on an international platform helped to change her market overnight," says Laib. The first big jump in price came in 2010. A 1952 work, Untitled (Continuous Form Within a Form) went for $98,500 at a June sale at Wright in Chicago; four months later, Untitled (Hanging Six-lobed, Multilayered Continuous Form Within a Form), from 1965-69, tripled its $180,000 high estimate to achieve $578,500 at Christie's. "That came a little bit out of nowhere," says Miety Heiden, senior vice president and head of contemporary private sales at Sotheby's. "You don't see her work that often at all at auction."

Today, "there is a huge demand for Asawa and a scarcity of available work," says Laib. "Anyone interested in Josef Albers and Black Mountain College has to have one; anyone looking to expand a collection past the predictability of today's blue-chip artists has to have one." The multilobed hanging works, particularly those done between 1955 and 1969, are very rare and the most sought after. Single- lobed works can be found for $70,000 to $250,000. The highest price for a smaller work was achieved at Christie's during its postwar and contemporary morning sale on May 16, when Untitled (S.082, Hanging Single Sphere, Five-Layer Continuous Form Within a Form) from the early 1960s sold for $255,750, more than triple its $80,000 high estimate.

The popularity of Asawa's signature looped wire sculptures has also brought attention to the tied-wire sculptures she began making in the early 1960s. These spindly tree branch-like pieces, which now start at $250,000, were going for as little as $18,750 in 2011. "There is a gap in pricing between the tied-wire and the looped-wire works," acknowledges Laib, but he predicts that gap will close in the coming years.

So far, Asawa's drawings, prints, and bronze sculptures have yet to achieve the lofty prices of the wire works. Prints from her 1965 residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop have sold for $3,500 to $3,800, while her drawings, which exhibit an early interest in the organic shapes found in her sculptures, have brought $3,000 to $6,000 at auction. Peter Loughrey, director of modern and contemporary art at Los Angeles Modern Auctions, has identified her lesser-known bronze sculptures from the 1970s as a good investment, saying, "there are some cast bronze pieces that are way undervalued."

"When we first started exhibiting Ruth's work, the most appreciative were the connoisseurs of this time period--largely dealers from New York who were aware and interested," says Rena Bransten, whose San Francisco gallery is currently working with a yet-to-be-named institution on a West Coast touring show of Asawa's lesser-known drawings. "Several key institutions that passed the work up in 2005 are [now] actively looking. In the eight years we have represented the work, the value has increased at least tenfold."

This rediscovery of Asawa's oeuvre, which comes in the wake of the reappraisal of other postwar design-art hybrids like Bertoia and Noguchi, will likely do much to secure the late artist's place among the important figures of the American avant-garde. At press time, however, it was unclear how many of her works have yet to enter the market. Bransten held the last show of pieces still owned by Asawa in 2009, after which the ailing artist gave her remaining works--thought to include quite a few large hanging wire pieces-- to her five children. Although Bransten had been Asawa's primary dealer for a decade, the children have maintained a close relationship with Laib, who has sold works privately for the family in the past. "I think the family is just waiting," Bransten says. "This last auction result of $1.4 million was enough to make them examine what they want to do and how they want to proceed. I wouldn't think a lot was going to be released at this time."

This article was published in the October 2013 issue of Art+Auction.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

-Ashton Cooper, ARTINFO

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When did I start needing my friends at home to tell me I'm having a good time on vacation?

Travel changed for the worse when I tucked a brand new Blackberry smart phone in my pocket on a 2009 trip to Morocco. Ostensibly the device was to let me stay in touch with my husband back home while I explored Marrakech with a friend. It turned out to be the first block in a barricade I'd build between myself and the art of travel. I wrote in my blog later:

Morocco was an entirely new world. It's an assault on all my senses and a test of my reflexes. The scent of mint and cumin compete with diesel fumes. Scooters bearing families of four buzz by within millimeters of my elbow - I leap out of the way, careful not to trip on the uneven cobblestone or step in front of that horse or donkey whose clip-clopping hooves can't be heard in the hubbub. The call to prayer tries to rise above the melee of the souk proprietors calling me to their store, the trill of the snake charmers, and the little boys asking where I'm going so they can lead me there for a few dirhams. ... Henna tattoo artists and clinking water sellers give way to night. The cacophony that would overwhelm me elsewhere energizes me here.

But even amidst all this, my eyes continually strayed to the little screen in my hand. I posted dozens of photos to Facebook and waited for comments. Morocco was the most compelling world I'd ever entered, yet Facebook had more allure.

It's been a downward spiral since. Riding camels in the Sahara, my silhouette on the silver sands came complete with phone in hand -- the better to chronicle the experience. Head tilted back in northern Thailand to marvel at thousands of lanterns soaring into the night sky during Loy Krathong, my view came through the camera screen on my phone. Scrabbling through the pungent dirt of a remote swath of Italy learning a truffle dog's secrets, I paused repeatedly the better to get just the right angle on a photo of the dog's snout emerging from the earth.

Great pictures? Pretty good. People on Facebook liked them, and on Instagram too when that came along. But really? Really, is that why I got on the plane?

A trip to Vietnam last year ignited an awakening -- to the realities of the world, to my shortfalls as a traveler. But even as I struggled to process the experience enough to write anything in my notebook, tap, tap, tap, I shot one cell phone photo after another. And just like that everyone back home could see exotic Saigon for themselves. Look! Dana with pho! But they couldn't know from those photos what I felt. I wrote later, from home:

... amidst the searing heat and frenzy and disappointment in myself were glimmers of joy, little pieces of Vietnam I could grab hold of to love. An inky black iced coffee poured over creamy sweetened condensed milk. A little boy running out as we zipped by his Cat Ba home on scooters, to give Brian a high five. The giggles of women who wanted to ask questions about my hair, so unlike theirs. The gnarled old lady who didn't have the exact right change for the cutting boards I bought who just gave me chopsticks instead. The cold bliss of fresh coconut juice. The perfection of a banh mi from the guy on the corner. The surreal moment when the monk in a temple at the end of a dirt road on the banks of the Saigon River read my future and told me to be calm, just calm down.

No faux-nostalgic photo on Instagram could speak to the maelstrom of feelings that traveling Vietnam sparked inside me. So why did I spend so much time attempting to document our experience with photos?

I could say I was too overwhelmed to write, and that's partly true. Aside from scribblings like "poisonous snakes are always cooked with papaya" my notebook contained little more than addresses and lists because I couldn't process what I was experiencing. But really it was just laziness. It was easier, far easier, to snap a photo as a memory aid than to force myself to connect enough with the situation to write down the details. And as much as I wanted to hang on to the barrage of stimuli and the thoughts tumbling through my head to mull over later, I killed that option bit by bit with every tap on the screen. I couldn't resist the profound urge to capture the experience -- I just went about it the wrong way.

Not every traveler falls prey to this temptation. Paul Theroux rarely takes photos. When I had the fantastic privilege of interviewing him, I asked him why.

"When you take pictures something in your brain shuts off," he answered. "When you don't take pictures you look very hard and you study the scene and you remember."

And some people get this. Travel writer Robert Reid, who fessed up to "rushing like a Black Friday shopper to spread news of [his] travels in real time" said in his recent National Geographic Traveler piece The Secret to Remembering Travel, "The key to maximizing future memories, then, is to simply be present, to pay attention to the details that interest you, to look at them closely."

This made me wonder. When did I last remember to be present and pay attention? It had to be on the first trip my husband and I took overseas -- a month in Europe in 2001. The only one where we had -- between the two of us -- one camera. A film camera. It offered no instant gratification. The film was costly. We used it sparingly (relatively speaking to today when we travel with a smart phone each plus a heavy duty digital SLR and a GoPro). And I wrote feverishly in a journal. Photos of that trip are one-dimensional trinkets. But re-reading words scrawled on a train I'm there again, experiencing the alchemy of travel, reliving the trip that transformed and shaped who I'd become. We had a digital camera by the next trip, and travel hasn't been the same since.




And now the temptation to use technology is so great that I haven't traveled without a tether to the rest of the world since the Morocco trip, except one perfect week off the grid rafting and camping along the Rogue River in Oregon. I wrote later of a beautiful moment not captured and immediately relayed on Instagram hashtagged #GuessWhatISawInMyBathThisMorning

Pure wonder is rare as an adult . Not much in the world of manufactured entertainment takes our breath away. So when I raised my face from a splash in the pristine water of the swimming hole at Mule Creek to find five sets of brown eyes contemplating me, I gasped. One by one, the deer turned and made their surefooted way out of the creek, leaving me dripping and smiling.

It's seared in my memory even without broadcasting it to the world -- or rather because I didn't.

But what about when I can't get off the grid? Mat Honan writes in Can't Get Away From It All? The Problem Isn't Technology -- It's You for Wired: "The phone isn't the problem. The problem is us -- our inability to step away from email and games and inessential data, our inability to look up, be it at an alpine lake or at family members. We won't be able to get away from it all for very much longer. So it's vitally important that each of us learns how to live with a persistent connection, everywhere we go, whether it's in the wilderness or at a dinner party."

It's time I learn to let go. We're flying 10,000 miles to start our next trip, a return to Southeast Asia. Airfare for my husband and me cost more than the used car we bought recently. He's on his only vacation of the year. Are we really traveling all that way and spending so much money and time to live out a travel show on Facebook and Instagram? One we know is half fake, anyway? (I wrote about the lie that is the shiny happy Facebook vacation after I spent a miserable rainy week in Florence posting gelato photos only to come home to find everyone thought I had an amazing trip.)

The answer has to be no. Even though (sadly) I get a little -- OK, a lot -- freaked out thinking about going dark on all my social media accounts for three weeks, and I'll have to retrain my Pavlovian response which is to post a photo of Every! Single! Thing! I think is interesting, and it will be a lot more work to be present than to just take a picture, to process my reactions internally rather than blurt them out on Facebook, I have to step away from the phone. We have a second chance in Vietnam. I'll take pen and paper -- and maybe a film camera -- and try to rediscover my lost art of travel.

For me, Thanksgiving weekend has always been a comfy cocoon of an event, a four-day haze of friends and family lazing and laughing our way through a tryptophan-soaked festival of do-nothingness. I revel in the lack of expectations associated with my favorite holiday. I am not a Black Friday shopper, as I do not possess the requisite bloodlust. In fact, I conspire never to leave whatever house I've landed in for the weekend. It's a herculean effort to worm me out of my pajamas.

However, when I got an email from my local independent bookstore asking if I would volunteer as a bookseller on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I knew I would wrench myself out from between the sofa cushions, dust off the stuffing remnants, scrub the dried gravy from my chin and venture out into the consumer maelstrom that is the biggest shopping weekend of the year. Why am I doing this? Why shall I abandon a Tupperware tower of leftovers and the joys of an elastic waistband? I will do it for my partners in nerdalicious bookdom, Malaprop's Bookstore and Cafe. I will do it for Indies First.

Indies First is a nationwide event during which authors volunteer as booksellers at their local independent bookstore. Spearheaded by author Sherman Alexie and with administrative and online support from the American Booksellers Association, this year's event takes place on Saturday, November 30, also known as Small Business Saturday. Back in September, Alexie wrote an open letter to authors urging all to be a "superhero for independent bookstores." For Alexie, the idea for Indies First grew out of a conversation and relationship with Janis Segress, co-owner of Seattle's Queen Anne Book Company, where Alexie himself has hand-sold books.

As a kind of subset of Small Business Saturday, Indies First makes perfect sense. Sandwiched between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Small Business Saturday fills a shopping void from more than just a calendar perspective. While Black Friday delights in Big-Box rampaging and Cyber Monday is about web scouring, Small Business Saturday encourages walking into a locally owned store and supporting your community. Egads, you might even have a conversation with someone! For independent bookstores in particular, that rarified market space--between big box and online--is where they live and breathe. Space is getting tight, but it's a space that authors and indie booksellers can grow together.

I've been incredibly lucky to land in the Malaprop's universe. In the more than 30 years since owner and founder Emoke B'Racz opened Malaprop's, it has served downtown Asheville, North Carolina, in countless ways. Malaprop's offers readings and recommendations, sure, and also promotes book clubs and supports local charities and arts organizations. Malaprop's gets it, from big picture vision down to small scale get-to-know-you interaction. The booksellers there do their best to support newbie and self-published authors while still hosting some of the most recognizable names in literature. They are arbiters of the joy of reading, not of some preconceived notion of taste. The store is full of discussion, meet-ups, poetry, and the occasional birthday party for 90-year-old regulars. It is a part of the community in a way larger and online competitors cannot be.

For authors, too, the independent bookstore occupies a sweet spot, one to be savored not just during Indies First, but year 'round. When my book The Girls of Atomic City came out earlier this year, it became my first New York Times bestseller. But while the book was an instant bestseller, I have not been. Malaprop's was supportive of my earlier titles as well, gave space to a freelancers group my husband, author Joseph D'Agnese, and I used to host, and listened as I lamented revisions and tried to manage my expectations as yet another book was about to come out into the world. As a reader and writer, I value my relationship with Malaprop's in more ways than I ever could have imagined when I first went in and introduced myself. I talk to Alsace Walentine, the store's events coordinator, not just about what I'm doing but about what other authors do, what approaches work better or worse, what booksellers are looking for and how best to promote.

We face similar frustrations, authors and independent booksellers, as we work to thrive in an industry-- publishing--that can feel at once perpetually shifting and hopelessly stuck. We bond together, doing what we can to support each other in this wacky world of words. So when The Girls of Atomic City was a hit, Malaprop's shared in that success with me. Launching my book among those familiar stacks felt special, because they had, in different ways, been along for the bumpy ride. When I get requests from across the country and even some other parts of the world for autographed copies of any of my books, I direct everyone (personally, or via my website) to Malaprop's. Offering signed copies via your local independent bookstore is something every author can do for both their readers and their bookseller. Because seriously--I don't see authors taking a sharpie to e-readers catching on.

So why should you, dear reader and shopper, care about any of this?

If you care about your community, you should care about shopping local. If you care about the economy, you should care about shopping local. If you care about books and the people who write them, you should care about shopping local. Each and every day we vote with our pocketbooks and the benefit of Indies First extends well beyond the pocketbooks of the author and the bookseller, and well beyond Small Business Saturday.

"When you shop small and local, more than 50 percent of the money you spend stays in your community," explains Malaprop's general manager Linda Barrett. "By supporting your local indie on Small Business Saturday, you directly support your friends and neighbors."

Indies First is a chance for authors to support the bookstores that have supported them. More than 1,000 authors at more than 400 bookstores in the United States will be participating. Cities like Venice, Italy, and Geneva, Switzerland are joining in as well. So while you're out and about this holiday weekend, stop into a local bookstore. If you see a befuddled bookseller, it might be an author in disguise. We are not always comfortable promoting ourselves, so you may hear us singing the praises of books our friends have written. We will of course happily sign books of our own as well. Ideally, the bookstores get sales, the authors get sales, customers get autographed books and a lot more money stays in your town. Pay it forward, and pay it back to the community.

To find an independent bookstore near you, visit IndieBound.

Truly well-written and thought-provoking plays are hard to come by, but Theater 167's presentation of J. Stephen Brantley's Pirira, which I caught at its recent extended run at the West End Theater, comes pretty close to being as transcendental as any that I have seen in the past few years. The topics of the play are nominally AIDS, poverty, homophobia, misogyny, white and black guilt--but really Pirira treats the human condition in a way that only the best theater does.

The play takes place in two unlikely settings: the storage room of a small NGO in Lilongwe, Malawi and the stock room of a wholesale florist in New York City's Flower District. The very pretty and headstrong Ericka (Flor De Liz Perez) is in Malawi as a volunteer, taking a break from a Wall Street career when she meets Jack (Stephen Brantley), a Californian who works for the NGO digging water wells for the local population. Ericka gets caught in the crossfires of an angry demonstration, and Jack saves her by carrying her down into a basement--where the demonstrators promptly lock them in! Jack really believes in what he is doing, while Ericka, who grew up in the projects of Brooklyn, sees him as just another white guy trying to "save Africa." He also has a few false preconceived notions about Ericka, it turns out.

Back in Chelsea, Chad (played by the fine featured Todd Flaherty) is an apparently disaffected young gay man who gets stuck one early morning talking to Gilbert (Adrian Baidoo) during a power outage in the flower shop basement. Gilbert is in the States studying on a scholarship and hopes to return to his native Malawi to open a night club. Chad spends a good part of the play trying to deconstruct Gilbert's homophobia and outdated views on gender roles. Gilbert it turns out comes from a family that has been affected by AIDS, and Chad has also undergone a life-altering event that he still has not overcome.



If this all sounds a bit heavy, Pirira is not. There are of course shades of Sartre's No Exit at first, but the play manages to roll along at a bubbly, almost effervescent pace in spite of the very serious subject matter at hand--credit in this case must go to the playwright and his nimble, clever dialogue. At one point Flaherty tries to rap, rhyming "Gilbert" with "filbert"--it may be one of the worst raps in recent musical history. In another affecting moment, Jack surprises Ericka by playing a truly melodic guitar rendition.

In a sense, Brantley has done away with traditional Aristotelian notions of time and space--everything takes place with all four actors on stage together throughout the play's seventy minute run. The dialogue weaves in and out between the two duos but it is more subtle and complex than that, as one line from one duo's dialogue is picked up by an actor in the second duo. This is no easy task, even for the talented quartet in question. The dialogue must more or less be delivered flawlessly for the quick-paced dialogue to move forward--less gifted actors might easily trip over each other's lines. In a few instances, more projection on the part of the cast might make the dialogue even clearer, but this is a minor criticism.

As the play rolls to its emotional finale, Ericka and Jack on the one hand and Chad and Gilbert on the other find that they are both attracted and repelled by each other, but they also learn that their notions of one other are skewed in ways revealing and (un)expected. The play is more than ably directed by Ari Laura Kreith who brings out the best in this difficult and novel staging. The audience at once takes in the commonalities between the two boys locked in the storage room and their counterparts in Malawi, while also keeping them distinct. It's no small feat. As we find out the details behind the personal tragedies that have in fact propelled each of the four characters to where they find themselves today, we can only smile at the way playwright and actors arrive at satisfying resolutions in this truly lovely production.

http://www.theatre167.org/

If meeting Danny Simmons was the beginning of a novel, I might write, "the doors quietly blew open and a great smiling man beckoned us in." At six feet two inches, with sparkling eyes and a welcoming smile, he shows us into his parlor sitting room, which has French doors on two sides. We knew from the moment we entered we were going to be traveling from a majestic Victorian home to the world of Africa, and marking our path with the dust of the ages are shamans, soothsayers, and healers.



I am floored by the collection that Danny Simmons has amassed of old and new African and African American art. And what's more wonderful is that I just happened upon his historic Crown Heights home by accident, through friends on July 4th. It is one of those New York occurrences that happens only so often, and now less and less frequently, because fewer artists can afford the luxury of independence in the once hidden valleys of the New York City landscape. As a consequence I count myself fortunate to be sitting with this wonderful collector, visual artist, philosopher, and supporter of emerging artists. In an environment of inescapable fascination untouched by designers and developers, completely his and totally unique to his personal experience, Simmons, the ultimate renaissance man, has been collecting for about 20 years, first in his NYC loft, now in his Victorian home in historic Crown Heights, where many former industrialists a century ago built their great marble, granite and limestone homes. I am a huge fan of the African Art section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the curator did an outstanding job on its presentation. The Brooklyn Museum also houses a substantial collection. I have not seen the Queens College collection.

But there is something quite different between a visit to a museum and living with a multitude of ritualistic amulets, masks, and shields, mixed with contemporary visual dialectic.

Simmons has not visited Africa often. For the most part his collection has been purchased through dealers. There are over 500 tribes in Africa, some who still practice divination, others less so, but still make masks for decorative purchase. Simmons identifies their authenticity by the oily depth of patina left on the wood from being handled, as well as by holes that have been carved -- not drilled -- into masks and then stretched when worn repeatedly, causing hairline cracks. Most of his pieces range from the early 20th century to the present. Because this is an uncurated space it is hard to pinpoint any one thing to talk about, but I'll take a stab at it. (I will only be able to select a limited number from a forest full of trees.) Above where Danny sits are several lifelike masks of men's faces that caught me from the first moment I saw them. Danny laughingly says, pointing up to a mask, "This one right here looks just like my handyman Lenny. I can find these people all over Brooklyn." Then he explains that they are from the Makonde people of Tanzania, a tribe that is still demarcating its life force with ancient rituals and ceremonial expressions all its own making, uncultivated by modern consumer slickness.



According to the Zyama website:

"The naturalism is exaggerated in many masks, with their full lips and receding cranium. The faces of the masks are often scarified. The Makonde have two main types of masks: helmet crests, known as lipiko, and face masks. The anthropomorphic face masks portray particular individuals or occasionally represent sickness. Design elements frequently include scarification marks, and eyebrows, lashes and coiffure made of real hair affixed with wax. The helmet masks have strong, African features. Male masks have beards, female ones lip-plugs."

"Africa is now largely Christian and Muslim," Danny explains. "Old Africa is fading a bit and becoming something new, less defined by mysticism." There are still rarified jewels like the Makonde.

I ask Danny what it feels like to live amongst all of these hundreds of ceremonial pieces. "Sometimes this house is literally humming," he tells me. He especially feels the presence of spirits when he shoots up to his painting studio on his air powered elevator, which looks like a dark grey glass time capsule from Woody Allen's "Sleeper." I can't help but think of H.G. Wells too. Danny is a time traveler of sorts. There he feels all that transcendental vigor while he paints. He accepts progress as a fact of life and does not rail against the inevitable changes that take place over time for everyone and everything. "We call it African art but these are religious pieces, pieces meant for power and divination." One can't help but see the skill, craftsmanship and imagination behind them. I ask Danny what his favorite piece is and he says, "Usually the last one I buy." He points to a piece that is really unique and says, "Look at this one. This is amazing, a real vulture's head and talons from the Yoruba people!" The largest nation in Africa, numbering 12 million, most of the Yoruba live in southwest Nigeria, with considerable communities further west in the Republic of Benin and in Togo. They are divided into approximately 20 separate subgroups, which were traditionally autonomous kingdoms.

Looking at it it's hard to say what it was used for, but it's made with mud, straw, fabric, and yes, a real vulture's head and talons. It makes a pretty exceptional Golem, with undoubtedly grand powers. If the point is to look scary the Yoruba have succeeded in warding off the spookiest ghosts. Sitting in this prettily detailed home that has to be somewhere over a hundred years old, I think of ladies crocheting and far off tribal dancing. I am caught up in the raw strangeness of the experience and what an ambiguous, unpredictable alternative universe this is, bringing together these worlds: past and present, polar opposites, culturally divergent experiences all mixed up into one unified causeway stretching from Africa to Brooklyn. Since he doesn't curate his space, things seem to evolve as he does, overflowing without concern for strategic best angles. I find it kind of dizzying, but enjoy it for what it is, a mini museum inside of Danny's head he has brought to life. And you can only patronize it by invitation.



Danny mixes old and new pieces from a myriad of contemporary American artists with African tribal pieces. We move to the stairs and Danny jets up on the magic bullet (he has some bone deterioration in one leg from an illness he incurred while travelling). On the way we see works by Mickalene Thomas -- a picture of a voluptuous woman with a rich black afro reclines daringly on a couch -- while Carol Walker, Derek Adams, Sol Sax are thrown into the mix, and a beautiful fair faced Massai mask of a ponytailed girl with deep red full lips. There is also a series of black and white vintage photos. I see one by James VanDerZee, of a classic beauty from the 1920s, and then I do a double-take. Borrowing its vintage look, a man looks up a woman's dress while she climbs a ladder. The image screams contemporary artist Alisha B. Wormsley.

We meet in Danny's bedroom among action hero figures and ancient comic book covers, including the first Negro comic book from 1941. There is a picture of his beautiful mother, whom his brother Russell resembles. I ask about his action heroes and comic books. "I love 'em," he says. Everyone needs a hero and I've got them all around me." I think he is a bit of a hero to many emerging artists who need support and encouragement.

We resume our journey to his studio on the top floor. He pulls out large paintings with bold colors and African fabrics set ubiquitously into the oil paint. As an artist he is about vivid abstract form, mostly on large canvasses. He is not smitten with concept as much as spirit and the raw saturation of paint. Surrounded by all that he has created are other artists' works. Sol Sax's violent photograph of a civil rights conflict between a cop and an activist in the 1960s, with an African mask superimposed on the face of the activist, is total genius. It stands quietly in a corner waiting to be noticed. It packs a punch, but so does everything around us. Beside a chair sits a Beauford Delaney painting of his mother's stoic face with patrician-style flatness. Too many treasures. If you hear some drums and no one is playing an instrument, you know you are at Danny Simmons's place.



Soon we return to the front sitting room where we began our discussion. I ask how he feels about today's contemporary artists, about conceptual art versus other forms. "It's nice, but after you figure it out so what? It's too intellectual! Ok, I get that." It evaporates quickly for him. Danny talks about the need for artists to expound more on their inner lives than to respond, as they do too often, to outside forces. He is encouraged by African American artists who reflect not only on race but the whole of their being, allowing their inner and outer lives to inform their experience. He expresses the need for an artist's humanity to drive forth from his or her total equation: the spiritual, mental, psychic, emotional, poetic, environmental, etc.

Too much commercialism seems to bore him to tears. "Money has never been a consideration for me," he says. "I'm always able to pay my bills. I like that my brothers made money. I can always borrow if I need to," he chuckles.

Danny has great magic of his own. He has invested in the artistic community around him. He co-founded Rush in Chelsea, and Corridor Gallery (literally in a corridor) in Brooklyn. He played a significant role in starting CURATENY, a multi-borough art show with 1500 participants. Danny, along with his brothers Russell and Joseph (AKA, Rev Run), invest their passion for art in a once-yearly benefit in the Hamptons called Rush for Life. Since 1995, Rush has exhibited some of the most exciting contemporary artists of this moment, including Kehinde Wiley, Renee Cox, Wangechi Mutu, Suntek Chung, and Mika Tajima, to name just a few. Their subsequent careers speak for themselves.

Our three hour visit has ended. I quietly look around and become very philosophical and dreamy. Usually when one walks into a house a feeling of the living occupants and sometimes their ancestors pervades one's experience, but for me I have travelled today thousands of miles to another continent, through a porthole to another time, or many other times, through the intimate whimsical world of a wizard. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for taking me on a trip, Danny.

Even before the six actors in Terrence McNally's And Away We Go form a hand-clasping circle and murmur a silent pre-show invocation, the author has them individually come forward, kneel down to (literally) kiss the stage, introduce themselves by (actual) name, and tell us their favorite and least favorite roles. None of them place And Away We Go in the latter category, although that may well change after the final performance of this Pearl Theatre Company production on December 15.

McNally's conceit is to show us a struggling acting company at the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens (458 B.C.), another at the Globe in London (in 1610), where they are rehearsing a new play by their resident scribe called The Tempest, another with a group of 1,896 Muscovites rehearsing the new Seagull. There are three more slices of backstage drama, culminating in a financially-strapped present-day resident theatre company on the verge of insolvency, presumably like the Pearl (which last gave us a scintillating production of Shaw's You Never Can Tell). Set in a fascinatingly prop-cramped backstage area, the characters flip from era to era and back, bemoaning the never-changing realities of "the fabulous invalid."

One actor -- momentarily playing a ticket buyer -- comes in and yells: "I don't want a refund, I want the last two hours of my life back!" Another pleads: "Just get on with it and when it's over, let us go home!" It's that kind of play: 115 minutes-worth without the chance to escape to the lobby or elsewhere.

One of McNally's time machine stops is at Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse in 1956, during the disastrous American premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Bert Lahr -- who starred in both that production and the re-envisioned one that reached Broadway shortly thereafter, with a new director -- spends this section offstage in his dressing room, moaning. Instead, we have his wife Mildred walking around cracking sardonic jokes. In the final part of the evening, the whole thing briefly -- and for no discernible reason -- turns into an AIDS play.

Mr. McNally, of course, knows well how to write; many of us are looking forward to his Mothers and Sons, which is expected on Broadway this spring. He also knows how to write funny, and has provided us with much laughter over the years. But not here (the biggest laugh of the evening is a sly stab at McNally's mentor, Edward Albee). One has to imagine that McNally -- who is no fool, dramaturgically speaking -- had some great scheme in mind as he was creating this play. Whatever it was, it doesn't come through at the Pearl.

Director Jack Cummings III is unable to make much of this strange soup, although he might profitably have spent more time sorting things out with the playwright. The cast does alright under the circumstances, with one exception: Donna Lynne Champlin, who breathes life and laughter into everything she is given to do (which in this case includes droll impersonations of a Russian cleaning woman and Mildred Lahr). Also standing out is Sean McNall in several roles, including a French leading man.

At one spot, late in the long long evening, McNally shuttles Champlin on and off as five characters in lightning-quick succession. This momentarily rouses the audience, and offers a hint of what the playwright must have intended for the play. What we get, alas, is a legit counterpart to his recent opera-based backstage comedy Golden Age, which visited the Manhattan Theatre Club last December and wasn't very effective. Far more so, though, than this And Away We Go.

"Creativity is no longer an elective. It's the future," says Adobe.

Not long ago Adobe released an international research study revealing the state of creativity in education, and the economic consequences for business and society everywhere in the world.

Called "Barriers to Creativity in Education: Educators and Parents Grade the System," the study showed there is a growing concern that the education system itself is a barrier to developing the creativity that drives innovation, and nurtures the new thinking skills needed in the new economy.

Parents and educators from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia felt that today's education system places too much emphasis on testing and not enough investment in the training, tools and time needed to teach creativity.

Among those surveyed were 4,000 adults; 2,000 were educators and 2,000 were parents of students in K-12 and higher education. A strong majority of the participants called for a transformation in the ways schools work.

When asked about the most important step to promote and foster creativity in education, U.S. respondents cited the need to:

• Provide tools and training to teach creativity
• Make creativity integral to the curriculum
• Reduce mandates that hinder creativity

In fall of this year, Adobe hosted artists and educators, philanthropists and policymakers from around the country to see if a consensus existed and to talk about an action agenda. Attendees included executives from the Knight and Hewlett Packard Foundations, TED Youth, EDUTOPIA (the George Lucas educational initiative), The Kennedy Center, Americans for the Arts, the U.S. Department of Education, the United Nations, Digital Promise, Microsoft and Silicon Valley Creates among others. This could mark an auspicious beginning to amass--and hopefully influence--public opinion.

Adobe recently participated in the Net Impact Conference, along with thousands of executives and employees of Silicon Valley firms. The theme "Change Starts Here," enabled Adobe to talk about Adobe Youth Voices, and "Education Trends Paving the Way for Societal Change"; and in particular," the creativity gap in education and the impact creativity can have on young people's sense of self and their aspirations.

For its part, the Adobe Foundation again hosted more than 100 students and educators from 23 countries at third the Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) Summit and immersed the students in a five -day media arts experience where they collaborated in groups with creative professionals and luminaries, learning new digital media skills.

The purpose of Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) is to spark young people's creativity, and give them the tools to hone their creative skills - using advanced digital media tools and tested storytelling techniques. As the Adobe Foundation puts it, "With greater creativity, and a greater belief in their own abilities, young people will be more engaged in their education and better prepared for a fast-changing global economy."

Nearly 100,000 youth have been touch by the Adobe Youth initiative.

Adding to its Adobe Youth Voices program, the Adobe Foundation has also launched a "$1M scholarship fund to empower youth worldwide to pursue creative careers or find innovative ways to improve their communities" and help those so inclined "to pursue an academic program or career in a creative field at an accredited college, university or certification program. "

Given the products and services Adobe sells there is little doubt that this is what is called "strategic philanthropy", a "powerful way to combine ... company marketing goals with (a) desire to increase the well-being of mankind."

"More companies, as they become global enterprises, are looking for ways to "do well by doing good" and in the process, create opportunities for kids all over the world.

The Greek economic crisis, is, among other things, a crisis of confidence. Investors, worried about the country's finances, pulled out their capital, and in doing so drove up interest rates and drove down the Greek economy to a near depression, provoking the default they so feared. Economists call this reversal of capital flows "a sudden stop." It is a vulnerability shared by all countries that have to borrow in a foreign currency, which effectively describes the Euro from Greece's perspective. Such economies are classified as financially "fragile."

These surprisingly emotional terms from economics -- "crisis of confidence", "fragile" -- describe Greek society today. This sudden stop is the reality Greek artists must work under. And this year's Athens Biennale, titled AGORA, has responded to this bleak situation by taking as its theme the question: "Now What?"





The abandoned Athens Stock Exchange, site of the Biennale
(Kyklos Ensemble photo by Mariana Bisti)

The Biennale, fittingly, is housed in the abandoned Athens stock exchange, a heavily scarred yet still elegant building. I spent a week there in October where I witnessed artists attacking the "Now What?" question through many methods: performance, workshops, and lectures, with audience participation always a key element. Fixed works on display were notable for their ability to fuse the activism felt by many artists with formal, visual solutions. This is exceptionally hard to do because even if the damage done by the crisis is apparent, the economic mechanisms underlying it often involve what economists call "invisible exports" (a type of financial flow) which by definition are hard to represent.


Not all the work being produced in Athens is centered on economics, more is focused on the political and social aftershocks. For instance the painting "Smelly," by Biennale co-director Poka-Yio (not at Agora), of "cartoon-like neo-Nazis parading in Athens," captures but also somehow radiates out the Weimar like political violence and fear now in Greece.



Poka-Yio, Smelly, 2013 (Athens, Greece)

Artists in the two art world capitals, New York and London, are operating in a very different economic reality from this charged atmosphere of Athens. Here the art market bubble is in place. The bubble has had distorting effects, on artistic production, on critical focus, even on conversation: the economics of the bubble are so remote from and unmoved by most artists' practices that the constant talk about it reminds me of a dog howling at the moon.

Very few artists or galleries can successfully navigate the bubble. Despite all the money flowing into the art market there is the worry that the time of greatest creative outbursts in these cities lies not in the present but the past.


David Kramer, Christmas Miracle 2013, (Brooklyn, NY)

Athens represents an alternative to this middle-aged predicament. But visiting Athens, even if cheap, can be emotionally costly. Visitors are vulnerable to the legitimate criticism they are voyeuristically indulging in economic disaster porn. (This isn't the whole story: Greece remains an advanced Western country, just one caught in a credit crunch. The hotel and restaurant industries are a generation ahead of America's. And though I expected to find protests everywhere, during my time in Athens I only saw one restless crowd -- it turned out to be people impatient to get into a showing of Frances Ha, the indie film by mumble-core star Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach).



The peripheral European countries, including Greece, are not recovering economically. Current fixes are half-baked, politically unfeasible, or actively destructive such as austerity.

The Belgian economist Paul De Grauwe has written of the Eurozone, "a monetary union can only function if there is a collective mechanism of mutual support." This is lacking in the EU. As a result, according to De Grauwe, there is little to "soften the pain for many people created by the booms and busts in capitalist societies."

This creates a heavy burden on art, to fill this gap. But much of the art I saw in Athens not only provided solace, it actually generated the confidence needed in Greece today. And if European economic and political institutions are failing, at the very least there are still functioning art institutions like the Athens Biennale, which alone seem able to provide the "collective mechanisms of mutual support" required in Europe right now.

To watch a video of the Athens Biennale, This is AGORA click here

I am not one to ordinarily write theater reviews, but I have just seen a play that is so worthy of acknowledgment that I feel compelled to call attention it -- particularly as it is a smaller, less publicized production that could otherwise slip past you.

The play, Every Day A Visitor, which is running from now until December 14 at The Clurman Theater on 42nd Street, brings to life a retirement home in the Bronx, where a handful of elderly residents are rusting away, awaiting the inevitable.

For those of us who have reached middle age, and become increasingly familiar with such surroundings through the experience of the generation before us -- and through contemplating the possibility that we may one day, sooner than we would like, find ourselves grappling with such circumstances firsthand -- the situation presented by the play is a poignant one.

But Every Day A Visitor is no dreary meditation on isolation, obsolescence and mortality. Quite to the contrary, it is an exuberant, sunny, rejuvenating take on a subject that for most of us is so unpleasant that we avoid it, until we cannot.

The light that comes streaming into this play begins with the scenario that its author, Richard Abrons, has crafted. In a moment of Archimedean inspiration, one of the denizens of the retirement home, Figliozzo (played by a vibrant and loveable Teddy Coluca), decides to escape the ennui of his quotidian existence by declaring that henceforth his fellow inmates should address him as former New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Rather than deriding Figliozzo's play acting as an onset of madness, the other residents are only too happy to board his flight of imagination. Soon La Guardia is joined by Bella Abzug, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and an octogenarian named Stoopak (a moving George Morfogen) who metamorphoses from mush to magisterial once he is named the President.

Abrons, who the play's program points out is older than many members of the veteran ensemble, renders his characters' transformation with an empathy that is so profound and an understanding so nuanced that it could only come with a firsthand appreciation for their inner lives. His seniors are not revitalized simply by engaging in a childhood game of make-believe, they are reinvigorated by regaining their sense of self-worth and their confidence in being able to affect the future, not just reflect upon the past.

Guided by the subtle, sure-handed direction of Margarett Perry, the standout cast, which also includes a wonderfully curmudgeonly Bern Cohen, a riotous Janet Sarno, and a radiant Joan Porter, makes you regret that actors of a certain age are all too often relegated to bit players on stage and screen. These daring, adept performers are not fading into the dusk; they are raging against the dying of the light.

Toward the end of the play, Evan Thompson, who portrays a delightfully buttoned-up Grossman/Alan Greenspan, sums up the fundamental perception at which Abrons takes aim: "They don't see us as people. They just see us as old."

Who among us has not been guilty of this inhumanity? Every Day A Visitor confronts this lazy thinking, not to castigate the audience, but to free us from its grasp. After seeing this play, you won't just see these seniors as people, you will see them as exceptional, complicated, tortured and joyous individuals -- people, that is, just like me and you.


Every Day A Visitor runs through December 14th on Theatre Row at The Clurman Theatre, 410 West 42nd Street.

By now, many of you know that Marvel Comic's next Ms. Marvel will be Kamala Khan, a 16-year-old high school student from Jersey City who happens to be a Muslim. With the award-winning writer, G. Willow Wilson, penning her adventures, I'm confident Kamala Khan will be a welcome change from the usual, belittling media depiction of the Muslim woman as Victim or Terrorist.

What some of you may not know is that a similarly intolerant climate is what prompted the creation of some of our best known superheroes. In the 1930s, as fascism was spreading across Europe, Bat Man and Superman were created by young, Jewish men in America and Canada to counter the hate and stereotypes that were overtaking the continent.




Looking back at history, I can't imagine that any one of us would agree with these fascist thoughts and ideals. I think most of us would quickly distance ourselves from such notions.

So what is it that binds so many to our fears and prejudices about Muslims, especially Muslim women?

As curator of the International Museum of Women's current exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women's Art & Voices, I spend my days interacting with powerful Muslim women from around the world who are all using their powers to help build better and safer communities.

Most recently, for instance, I met Sakena Yacoobi from Afghanistan, who founded the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) in 1995 to bring education, health and training to women and children by working at the grassroots level. She first began teaching in refugee camps then moved to supporting secret homeschools inside Afghanistan during the intolerable Taliban rule. Today, AIL supports more than 40 learning centers and schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, educating women and girls in order to empower them and help them financially support their families.





Yacoobi is optimistic and told Muslima that she sees "a future in Afghanistan where women and men work together as equals, where no one's human rights are abused."

A recipient of the prestigious 2013 Opus Prize, which awards "unsung heroes of any faith tradition with a $1 million award for efforts to solve today's most persistent and pressing global issues," Dr. Yacoobi exemplifies the kind of strength, determination and courage I've come to expect from Muslim women.




For this reason, I find myself repeatedly surprised by the number of people who continue to hold onto the notion that Muslim women are nothing but downtrodden weaklings who can't save themselves let alone anyone else.

It's an unfortunate symptom of the Islamophobia that continues to permeate the American and European climates, negatively impacting all of us alike.

I invite you to experience a regular day in my life. To make it easy for you do to this and see the strength of Muslim women worldwide, the Muslima exhibition just launched an entirely new gallery called Breaking Stereotypes.

Here, you'll meet a women's soccer team from Zanzibar. This group of young Muslim women athletes named the New Generation Queens is redefining their roles in the community by challenging long-held ideas about women, Islam and sports.




Young Korean artist, Muna Hyunmin Bae, is also challenging people's idea that Muslim women are the only ones who wear the veil. In her paintings, Bae shows the link between Korean and Islamic traditions date back to the 1390s!




And since so many do connect Muslim women to the veil, German artist Feriel Bendjama shows the humorous side of a veiled woman in order to represent her many facets.




Explore the new Breaking Stereotypes gallery today and see ordinary women from around the world accomplishing extraordinary feats.

Not everyone decks the halls in style. Inevitably, between the poinsettias and twinkling lights there will be a collection of heinous, tacky and useless decorations. Here are nine of the most ho-ho-horrible offenders that are sure to destroy your holiday spirit.

Car Christmas Wreaths
You love the holiday's soooo much that you want to rock around the Christmas tree in your car. Unfortunately, you aren't Santa, and a wreath tethered to the grill of your Honda does not a sleigh make.


"Collector" Christmas Plates
No one collects Christmas plates. Ever. Collectable plates are the fruitcakes of the office secret Santa. No gift says "I hate holidays and joy and you" like a display-only plate that you can't even eat off of.


Anything With Beer Cans
Santa did not have a beer belly that shook like a bowl full of jelly when he laughed. The only thing acceptable about combining beer and Christmas is the Budweiser Clydesdale commercial. While we appreciate DIY and recycling, using your leftover cans as décor is Grinch-worthy.


Menacing Nutcrackers
We all love the Nutcracker ballet: the music, the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. We do not all love a menacing Nutcracker staring at you from the mantle. They also fall into the category of utterly useless. Has anyone, ever, actually cracked a nut with one of these?


Holiday-Themed Bathroom Decorations
Saint Nick should never be gazing up at you from the bath mat or scrub-a-dub-dubbing his rosy cheeks on a shower curtain. Forget about putting Mr. Claus' face on the toilet seat. That's pretty much a guaranteed trip straight to the naughty list.


Creepy Elves
Elf On A Shelf is designed to strike fear in the hearts of children. What, with their pointy ears and evil, beady little eyes following you. And, it feels strange to tell kids that someone is watching them, day in and day out, tattling to the big man if they step out of line. NSA anyone?


Inflatable Lawn Ornaments
Outdoor holiday décor has really blown up over the last decade. Problem is, most people hate it. You don't hear Christmas carols about a 6ft tall inflatable snow globe with Mickey Mouse dressed like Santa stuffed inside.


Giant Scary Santa
He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake ... he's lurking in the shadows of your hallway at night. Whoever decided to make a near life-size Santa and dress him in old dark cloaks clearly hates children (and adults for that matter).


Inappropriate Christmas Lights
When you think of a winter wonderland do you picture Santa taking a leak off of the roof? How about Donner and Blitzen bleeding out in your backyard? If one of these "ironic" light displays are in your yard you deserve more than a lump of coal.





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Superabundant Atmosphere / Infinite Expanse of Sky, 2008
Paper, silk, wood, nylon
Installation view
Courtesy Studio la Città - Verona
© Michele Alberto Sereni

From Sky Landscape Series. Ongoing project. Air planes shot at a low exposure crisscrossing the sky.

Last year, England celebrated the 200th anniversary of novelist Charles Dickens' birth. His sharp eye for satire and his passion for social justice upended Victorian pretensions. He created some of literature's most memorable characters in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. And in one of his most beloved tales, A Christmas Carol, now at Off-Broadway's charming Theatre at St. Clements, his gift for caricature and push for a humane society is smartly staged.

Patrick Barlow, who adapted the Tony-winning 39 Steps, has again employed his gift for economical prose, having five actors bring Scrooge, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchet, Tiny Tim and Mrs. Fezziwig, among others, to life. Given the recent "two New Yorks" theme espoused by new mayor Bill de Blasio, the politics of A Christmas Carol seem modern, a reminder that economic disparity remains an ongoing concern.

Christmas Carol opens at the offices of Scrooge & Marley; Marley is dead, but Mr. Scrooge (a solid Peter Bradbury) who operates a financial lending business, views Christmas as a time "when we part fools from their money." He disdains the poor -- "are there no workhouses?" -- and champions greed over charity. Scrooge sounds like a Tea Party politico, deaf to the cries of needy children and a suffering humanity. Indeed, his lust for money is a slam on industrial capitalism.

Considering the current chasm between rich and poor, such Dickensian meditations give this Christmas Carol added punch.

Best of all, Barlow and director Joe Calarco keep the action moving, while Chris Lee's lighting and Anne Kennedy's costumes are perfect. The props, mostly two Victorian staircases, are simple. It's left to the imagination and the talents of capable actors Mark Light-Orr, Mark Price, Jessie Shelton and Franca Vercelloni to take us on the nighttime journey of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Kennington Common sounds suspiciously like Occupy Wall Street, while Scrooge's treatment of his kindly clerk Bob Cratchett are stark reminders of the moral obligations of wealth.

Dickens, a fierce critic of the Victorian class system and the treatment of the poor, marries social realism to sentimentality here. It succeeds in this crisp rendition because Scrooge's ethical awakening isn't forced; the happy ending has pleased audiences for 170 years. For a man who likes an audit, this one gives Scrooge a clever, entertaining run for the money.

A second Dickens' work, the masterpiece he considered his best, Great Expectations, is being adapted into a streamlined 90-minute show for the Abingdon Theater Company. Playing one night only, December 9, at the June Havoc Theater, the adaptation is by Donald Brenner.

Dickens' famous tale of the orphan Pip, the strange, fixated Miss Havisham, the beautiful, aloof Estella, kindly Joe, the blacksmith, odious Uncle Pumblechook, and the odd twists of fate that happen as a result of one terrifying encounter on the Kent marshes, is captivating. The ever-present themes of wealth and poverty, cruelty and redemption, are underscored by Broadway leading man James Barbour, Dexter's Sam Underwood as Pip, Alma Cuervo, Jazmin Gorsline, Peter Herrick, Bill Nolte, Larry Pine and Judith Roberts.

Photo: Joan Marcus

Click here to watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.

I'm listening to Mike Rowe talk about his Aha! moment, castrating a lamb in Craig, Colo., a few hours north of my current Colorado foothills hometown, which some folks call, "The Brooklyn of Boulder."

I cannot say I've "been there, done that" on the livestock spaying front the way Rowe has.

But I relate to his eyes-wide moment of wonder as he approaches the task.

"How did I get here?" Rowe wonders. I relate to that, too.

My mind flashes back from the little lambs on that Craig, Colo. pasture to a pile of Dalmatian-print polyester on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, to a table of live doves at a Reagan-era fundraiser. We're in the field of fashion now, as opposed to animal husbandry.

But the leap isn't as far -- or as tame -- as you might think.

With thanks to Mike Rowe for the memories, here are two of my favorite Aha! moments in the NYC fashion biz. They're not as overtly ballsy as his lamb job, and I don't include them on my LinkedIn profile, because who would hire me to do them again?

But these tasks scared me senseless and/or made my heart sing. And isn't that what the best jobs are about?

"Counting the Carnet for Jean-Paul Gaultier"

The Task:
Count a hundred dozen-ish Dalmation print fake fur hats, gloves and accessories imported by French fashion maverick Gaultier for his first U.S. fashion show, to be held in a Big Apple Circus tent in Battery Park City.

My Workspace:
Seated cross-legged on the floor of Bergdorf Goodman's atrium, seven stories above Manhattan's bustling Fifth Avenue.

How I Got This Job:
My new boss called her last version of me and asked, "Do you know anyone crazy enough to do this?"

The Aha! Moment:
The executives see my job as dirty work, the kind of task that Cinderella's stepsisters might event. But counting the carnet is Zen-tastic to me. I'm sitting in a quiet, sun-filled space, connecting with objects of pure design genius.

Tomorrow, taking on another job no one wants, I'll ride shotgun in the truck carrying the collection downtown to the circus tent. The city will stretch before me. The oddly gorgeous objects described in the carnet -- properly counted -- will follow behind me.

Color me one lucky faux fur trucker.

"Supermodel Management"

The Task:
Stop six supermodels from going AWOL from a fashion show fundraiser with clothes by Italian fashion house Jenny, attended by President Ronald Reagan and a host of mid-1980s A-Listers.

My Workspace:
An unheated hallway in the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in DC.

How I Got This Job:
My Uncle Sidney's neighbors' friend's daughter needs an Italian-speaking American gal Friday for an event she's producing over Presidents' Day Weekend, which will feature live Italian doves on each table, and a six-pack of supermodels on the runway.

I'm studying Italian at college in Philly, so I get the job.

I won't be paid for this gig in money, I'm told. But I will get some real-world experience.

The Truth:
The models -- faces I know from the covers of Vogue, and Elle and W and Bazaar -- are threatening to fly back to New York unless I take them some place warm to wait out the hour before show.

The armed guard at the ballroom says civilians who leave a presidential event will not be readmitted.

What do I do?

I'll have to decide this on my own.

My boss is sneaking Julio Iglesias through the kitchen to avoid the paparazzi. And her boss is drinking Champagne with the Princess of Savoy. Plus, did I mention, this is 1984: there are no cell phones?

As we walk back to the ballroom, I'm sure I'm going to be arrested by the CIA. Or (even scarier) yelled at by the booking agent for Ford Models! How will that look when I apply to law school? -- Sharon Glassman

The models want cheeseburgers. They want to watch the Winter Olympics on TV.

I can make that happen, I think. I'm 19 years old. I know zip about team management. But I know a lot about cheeseburgers.

I escort the models back to my hotel room. We order room service. They watch Brian Boitano skate.

It's like a slumber party with girls in $1,000 dresses.

The Aha! Moment:
Time to lead the models backstage. But how? As we walk back to the ballroom, I'm sure I'm going to be arrested by the CIA. Or (even scarier) yelled at by the booking agent for Ford Models! How will that look when I apply to law school?

But when we get to the Scary Guard, he just nods and waves us backstage.

Why? you ask. I don't know.

Was I terrified? You betcha.

The Bonus:
But scary jobs can lead to great rewards.

Earlier that day, I delivered a Jenny dress to Mrs. Grant's room. Her husband answered the door in a dressing gown, holding a handsome hand of cards.

I was speechless.

He said, "Thank you."

And maybe this is the moral of my "how did I get here?" odd-job story:

Six supermodels may trump an armed guard. But no one will ever trump my memory of Cary Grant.

Writer/performer Sharon Glassman's new novel-with-songs is called Blame It On Hoboken. Visit http://sharonglassmanlive.com for performance dates in Northern Colorado and beyond.

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