One of the many things I love about the movie Dogma is Salma Hayek’s portrayal of The Muse – a feminist spirit determined to create her own art, reduced to dancing in a strip club where the patrons are consistently struck with great ideas. The creative muse is always portrayed as female, perhaps because artists in the past have usually been male. Or at least, female artists have not seemed to rely as heavily on the idea of the muse. Perhaps because women have seldom had access to that room of one’s own that offers the luxury of a tryst with the muse, female artists have had to take a more workmanlike approach to their art. Read More
ByGD
Where the Muse Takes Me
ByGD
Freedom on the Edge
As a student of ecology, I learned about the importance of edges. The variability of resources and environments in the interface between the forest and the meadow, or the land and the water, allows a greater variety of species to thrive. Many species can only survive in the edge habitats, and others, like humans, thrive best there.
As a student of yoga, I learned about the importance of the edge. You grow most when you push yourself right to your edge, to the boundary between what you are already capable of accomplishing and what will injure you.
Koi and Blue and White Vase by David Kroll
Perhaps that is why so many of my most significant moments happen in the edge times – between putting the kids to bed and going to bed myself, at the very beginning of trip as I step out of the airport, between the bus stop and work. The Grover/Thurston Gallery [2014 update: now extinct] lies on my path from bus stop to day job, and I always look through the windows as I pass to see what’s on display. Sometimes what I see interests me, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes, I am transported by the art inside. Read More
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Desiree’s Dolls Returns
Last Christmas, I wrote about Desiree’s Dolls at the Ballard Market. Stone took a holiday away from the market from Christmas until the Superbowl, but she’s back with her wonderful dolls now. You can read what I wrote before here or view her YouTube commercial here:
Update: Desiree’s Dolls is now on Etsy.
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Omnivore’s Delight and Dilemma
In his inaugural blog post on Bandcamp, Andrew Dubber wrote about the trade-offs that come from being a musical omnivore. On the one hand, you can never listen to enough music to get the depth of knowledge in any one genre that say, a true metalhead may have of Finnish melodic death metal. On the other hand, you get a breadth of music that a specialist lacks. An omnivore can still listen to some Finnish melodeath, but won’t miss out on Sigur Ros. Another joy that comes from omnivory is that sometimes it allows you to see hidden threads in the zeitgeist. Read More
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When the de la Cruz Family Danced – Book Review
Seeing a book on at the bookstore with my friend’s name on the spine gives me a vicarious thrill- but I open the book with a feeling of trepidation. What if I don’t like it? I cannot, like Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, look my friend in the eye and flatly state, “Frankly, it was bad. You should stick to (insert day job here).” Perhaps that is why it took me six months after the release of “When the de la Cruz Family Danced” to get around to reading my coworker Donna Miscolta’s first published novel. I needn’t have worried. Read More