by Christina Waters | Sep 26, 2016 | Home |
In a smart and emotional article in New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan concludes:
There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived. And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls.
He is bordering the territory I explore in my forthcoming book, Inside the Flame, tracking the erosion of human interaction, of rich sensory experiences created by spending our lives bombarded with, and connected to electronica. Worse—it’s addictive, and even though my book is devoted to direct discovery of the tactile world, I admit that I spend far too much time lurking around the political miasma-du-jour, celebrity break-ups, cinema backstories, and just about anything Zappos wants to tempt me with. (to be continued)
by Christina Waters | Sep 4, 2016 | Home |
Many people feel that the time they spend at work is essentially wasted — they are alienated from it, and the psychic energy invested in the job does nothing to strengthen their self. For quite a few people free time is also wasted. Leisure provides a relaxing respite from work, but it generally consists of passively absorbing information, without using any skills or exploring new opportunities for action. As a result life passes in a sequence of boring and anxious experiences over which a person has little control.
That’s a quote from a famous book called Flow, by a man with a complicated name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I’ll just refer to him as M.C.).
Let’s unpack this for a moment. Yes, absolutely most people feel that time spent at work (which I’m assuming is a 9 to 5 situation) is “essentially wasted.” And it’s work in which our emotions and creativity are rarely engaged, e.g. administration, shipping and receiving, prepping ingredients at the restaurant.
M.C. goes on to say that many of us also waste our free time, the so-called “down time” in which we can do whatever we please outside the narrow, drab sphere of the workplace. He points out that (more…)
by Christina Waters | Sep 3, 2016 | Home |
The current New Yorker cover illustration by Christoph Niemann brought back a tingling rush of pleasure for those long summer days during graduate school when I played more than my fair share of tennis.
The body’s arc of contraposto just before letting loose the serve, the ball tossed to the exact point in space where the racquet would soon hit. The illustration is a master class in graphic design. Minimum of shapes and colors. The long reach of the arm almost pushing through the magazine cover. The beautiful expanse of sky blue, echoed by a gathering of blue ovals to suggest the crowds watching the U.S. Open. I can feel the heat and the tension of the game. The crowning achievement of this delicious image is the placement of the tennis ball—exactly on the spot of the “O” in “YORKER.” A slam dunk for the eyes!
You can watch an animated version of this illustration—or you can get out on the court and play!
by Christina Waters | Sep 1, 2016 | Home |
Screenwriter James Schamus turns director with this supple adaptation of the 2008 Philip Roth novel Indignation, starring Logan Lerman as socially innocent, intellectually precocious Marcus Messner, son of a kosher butcher from Newark, New Jersey. We meet Marcus as he prepares to leave home for a Winesburg Ohio college, thereby avoiding the Korean War draft. Both the father (played with incessant anxiety by Danny Burstein) and his wife (a smoldering Linda Emond) have high hopes for their brilliant son. Assigned to room with two other non-Gentiles, Marcus throws himself into his studies, rankles at the required chapel services, and finds himself entranced by Olivia, a blonde shiksa with sexual experience (a disarming Sarah Gadon).
Schamus has managed to pull off a tricky balance of Roth’s tangled portrait of a young man’s coming of age, against the backdrop of parents who no longer know him and the isolation of his uncompromising intelligence. After his uncomfortable dorm situation comes undone—triggered by an event of sexual candor between Marcus and his new girlfriend—the high-strung freshman is called into the dean’s office.
Well here the film dares to be true to its literary roots, (more…)
by Christina Waters | Aug 26, 2016 | Home |
Painter Hildy Bernstein is an existentialist and a shamanic seeker. In her relentless artwork she probes her own unconscious as well as the unseen world of mythic archetypes. She waits, all her skills ready like the sword of a trained fighter, until that elusive something (meaning?) begins to materialize. And then she makes her move.
What she captures—retrieves from her solitary vision quest—is ours to decipher. She makes no claims as to what the faces, and haunted moments of somebody’s history, might mean. But she brings it to us to savor. To contemplate. And to find within the work some new aspect of our own lives. Some of it is confrontational, even difficult to consider. All of it is authentic.
For more about the work of Hildy Bernstein see my June 2016 profile of her. The work of this fearless artist will be on exhibit starting Saturday, September 24th at the wild and gala Anne & Mark’s Art Party in San Jose, through October 1.
