by Christina Waters | Apr 30, 2015 | Home |
Once upon a time people went out to galleries, museums, private homes, and lots of other places, to enjoy seeing artwork.
Today people go out to rented spaces, retail shops, and studios to support artists.
In other words, people go out and congregate in places filled with all of their friends to support the work of another one of their friends. The results can be scorchingly bad. Privately, people will admit that they’re weary of having to support the arts, weary of traipsing through one more opening of work that would embarrass a beginning student. Everybody knows it’s become an obligation, rather than a pleasure. These sorts of vanity fairs fail to surprise, delight, or provoke controversy. They’re designed to bolster egos and provide soothing reassurance.
The word “support” makes this party-like activity seem like a good thing, like helping a disabled person cross the street. Or throwing a Tupperware party. But supporting such vanity activities actually neutralizes genuine art-making, and levels the hard work, brilliance, and inspiration of real artists.
Art in the era of digital reproduction has been reduced to so much hobbyism, therapy, narcissism, and social activist reassurance. Instagram, ergo sum.
At these politically-correct gatherings—people come in, and go out very very quickly (more…)
by Christina Waters | Apr 24, 2015 | Home |
We’ve been the best of friends, we’ve been the worst of enemies. We’ve been intimate and we’ve been indifferent. But Stephen Kessler and I have known each other for 35 years and except for the few decades when we didn’t speak, we’ve managed to maintain a robust respect for each other’s shared defiance in the face of mediocrity.
Stephen Kessler has written with a fierce intelligence pretty much every single day of his life. From those early alternative riffs called “Polygraph” that he penned at the dawning of the age of the Santa Cruz weeklies, to his literarily impeccable Redwood Review, to countless gracefully nuanced, and internationally celebrated translations of the A list of Spanish poets, Kessler just doesn’t know how to cease and desist.
And just when we thought we’d already collected enough of his work to savor for years to come, he up and launches not one, but two new works. New prose poems that Proust their jazzy way through some of the key memory spots in his personal biography—Where Was I?—and a brilliantly curated “greatest hits” of memoirs, essays, vision quests, and kvetches titled Need I Say More?
I savored the prose poems, rife with street scenes of LA and Santa Cruz, (more…)
by Christina Waters | Apr 20, 2015 | Home |
Like many of you, I still carry a torch for the intimate bistro, with its tiny little upper room and its tall Victorian brick walls, the original Oswald. During its delicious flowering nothing could match it.
But last week I enjoyed a dinner at the newer incarnation of Oswald, on its dicey corner of downtown, with its spare eschewing of ambience, and found it—yes, I’ll say it—as good as I remembered those earlier Oswaldian days.
How in God’s name could an appetizer as, shall we say “yesterday” as seared ahi, be so insanely perfect? This one was. From its sparkling fresh tuna, to the impeccable potatoes, beets (beets that somehow recoined the entire concept of “beet”), and sexy snap peas. It was a one-dish premonition of Spring, and the beginning of a dinner that went from great to greater.
My full review of this wonderful dinner at Oswald is available in the current GTWeekly.
