Opinion
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Programming at MASS MoCA
Lots to See and Do
By: - Apr 08th, 2026Music isn’t the only art form you can experience outdoors at MASS MoCA this summer: Amanda Lovelee's Homecoming and Pep Rally for the Trees opens on our annual Community Free Day (June 13), and invites visitors to contemplate and celebrate the assisted migration of two “trees-in-residence”. MASS MoCA’s expansive collection of long-term outdoor exhibitions will reopen for the season (May 23) and the indoor galleries continue to sing with newly installed works by Laurie Anderson, the recently opened Technologies of Relation, and a participatory commission by Boston-based Chilean artist Daniela Rivera (on view beginning July 11).
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The Self You’ve Been Seeking is Already Here
Delusion of Lack and Freedom of Becoming Nobody
By: - Apr 07th, 2026We often treat awakening as a destination—a distant mountain peak we must climb through sheer effort, “magic” mantras, or intellectual gymnastics. But there is a persistent shadow that follows the practitioner: the Delusion of Lack. It tells us that who we are right now is insufficient, and that the peace we seek is always just one more book, one more form, or one more retreat away. In my work with students, I see this delusion manifest in two primary ways: the Abyss and the Shield.
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Sarasota Opera House Centennial
Celebrations
By: - Apr 03rd, 2026In 1956, around the time that Elvis Presley was first called the “King of Rock and Roll,” he stepped on the stage of what is now the Sarasota Opera House for four shows that apparently attracted relatively small crowds. Just four years earlier, the theater was packed and the streets outside were crowded for the star-studded premiere of “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Cecil B. DeMille’s look at the circus world that had been partially filmed in Sarasota. It would go on to win the Academy Award for best picture.
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Dishwasher Dialogues Leroy, Bukowski and Simone De Beauvoir
He Had Our Backs
By: - Apr 01st, 2026: The French have a fascination with Charles Bukowski, he seems to confirm their deep-seated need to equate creativity and self-destruction.
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Hermitage Artists Retreat Expands Reach
Gifted Land on Manastoa Key, Florida
By: - Mar 31st, 2026For more than two decades, hundreds of writers, painters, composers, dancers and others have come to the Hermitage Artist Retreat on Florida's Manasota Key for inspiration to create new work. They stay in historic, waterfront cottages as they develop new exhibits, prepare for premieres of plays and symphonies, share ideas with other creatives on the campus or take time to recharge by walking on the beach and watching sunsets.
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Summer at The Mount
Richly Varied Programming
By: - Mar 31st, 2026This summer marks the debut of The Mount’s refreshed visual identity, honoring Edith Wharton’s legacy while embracing the organization’s evolution into a vibrant, multidisciplinary cultural center.
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Dishwasher Dialogues, Get a Real Job
Square One
By: - Mar 26th, 2026I was very lucky. I have met over my life many painters who are better than I am in all ways, better technically, with a more fertile imagination, hard-working and self-disciplined, and they have had no luck, haven’t made it to square one.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues, Parisians Sans Haute Couture
La Sagesse des Clodos
By: - Mar 19th, 2026For the bums in the subway, each person could be a heating source for the other. The metro was usually warm when the stations were underground, and that’s why I never took the bus in winter. They weren’t well-heated. I felt for the clochards, les clodos–—the beggars and the outcasts, who spent their days in the metro.
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The Dance of Change
Understanding Bagua in the Daoist Tradition
By: - Mar 18th, 2026To understand Bagua (Eight Trigrams), one must first look past the physical movements of the martial art and toward the very architecture of the universe as viewed by the ancient Daoist sages. In the Daoist cosmogony, we move from the Wuji (the Empty Void) to the Taiji (the Supreme Ultimate/Yin and Yang). Bagua represents the next step in this unfolding: the diversification of energy into eight fundamental forces that govern all change in the natural world.
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New Human Species Identified
Not Fossil Remains, but Living Today
By: - Mar 17th, 2026Conventional wisdom says that after millions of years of evolution, Homo sapiens is the sole surviving species of human. But in his book Fire in a Wire, Berkshires-based author Steven Reed Nelson disagrees.
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Dishwasher Dialogues, Art and Love in Paris
A Fabulous Bubble
By: - Mar 11th, 2026I think I returned to Europe because I felt less of an exile here. It has nothing to do with passports. I think, at times, that exiles don’t exist. They’re a useful concept for people who exist in places between places. They don’t have any coordinates, no national longitudes, and latitudes.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues, Death and Taxes
Art and Immortality at the Customs Depot
By: - Mar 05th, 2026From the very beginning, I wanted to leave my stamp on the cultural matrix of my time. A word to the wise guy: if, as a painter, immortality isn’t high on your list, then you should do something else.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues, I Have Seen Four People Die
Running with the Bulls
By: - Feb 26th, 2026I have seen four people die in my life so far, that’s it. I want to recount this. The first man I saw die drowned off a beach in Mallorca. When they hauled him out, he was still alive and foaming at the mouth, as if he’d swallowed soap and not seawater. He died a few minutes later. I was eight years old.
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Sarasota Performing Arts Center
Updated Plans
By: - Feb 19th, 2026It has been just under a year since members of the Sarasota Performing Arts Foundation brought their plan for a new performing arts center within The Bay Park to the Sarasota City Commission, hoping to move the public/private partnership forward toward implementation and a final design. What they got instead was an earful of critiques and a charge to return to the drawing board prior to any vote on a controversial project that’s been part of Sarasota’s bayfront revision plan since its start in 2018.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues, Groping for Light
Secrets of the Cave
By: - Feb 18th, 2026The men tried to impress the ladies. We on the staff just raised our eyes and said ‘oh, oh, another major bullshitter’. Few simply said, ‘ahh, c’est un excellent vin’. Oh no, most of them had to embellish with comments about le bouquet, la robe, les larmes, la belle attaque, la couleur, and tra-la-la.
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Programming Joy
Cultural Strategy in an Age of Exhaustion
By: - Feb 12th, 2026I keep returning to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. Few global artists have been as scrutinized and politicized as he has. His communities remain persistently endangered, and his homeland exists within the long, uneasy tensions of American territorial power. By every expectation of protest performance, that stage could have been a site of fury, a reckoning, an indictment, a civic interrogation broadcast to the largest audience on earth.
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Dishwasher Dialogues, Dracula and the Iron Curtain
Operation Jungle Book
By: - Feb 11th, 2026If I had been arrested, I would have given up your name in a heartbeat. Even if they didn’t ask me.
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Cultivating Your Inner Healer
The Power of Qi
By: - Feb 10th, 2026You have the power to cultivate and direct your chi for healing purposes. This isn’t about magic or mysticism; it’s about harnessing the body’s inherent capacity for self-regulation and tapping into a powerful energy source
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Dishwasher Dialogues Latrine Duty with Edgar Allan Poe
Quoth the Raven
By: - Feb 05th, 2026We could eat anything on the menu. Nothing was held back from us. Whatever we wanted. Except for the ‘chitlins’ which as far I remember none of us was capable of eating.
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Dishwasher Dialogues Folly and Madness in Theatre
Blacck to Black
By: - Jan 29th, 2026Given its experimental nature, Black to Black had quite a run after Edinburgh, in a variety of different spaces and theatres in Paris; and then special invitations to festivals in Switzerland and Lyon. Then, along with One Day in May, it was eventually published in Toronto in a Canadian Playwright series.
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The Effortless Path
Tree Is Not Trying To Be a Tree It Just Is
By: - Jan 27th, 2026The busybody spirit, constantly attempting to engineer a better outcome or a superior version of one’s being, traps the consciousness in a cycle of tension and insufficiency. This inherent judgment, this constant striving against the current reality, is what consumes our time and energy, diverting us from the deep, undisturbed reservoir of our original nature
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Fresh Grass and Williamstown Theatre Festival
Cancel 2026 Season
By: - Jan 26th, 2026First Williamstown Theatre Festival and now MASS MoCA's Fresh Grass have cancelled their 2026 seasons.
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Dishwasher Dialogues American Infantilism
Capitalist Art Run Amuck
By: - Jan 21st, 2026From the moment I arrived in Paris, I started writing poems. I was disciplined about that. I was under no illusion that I was going to make much selling poems or plays written in English to a French audience. But I was eager to do something with them. The incongruity of coming to Paris to write in English never seriously crossed my mind.
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Dishwasher Dialogues, Theatre of Mischief
Looking For Samuel Beckett
By: - Jan 16th, 2026The Boulevard Saint Jacques wasn’t that long, it ended at Rue de la Santé. I forget where exactly, and after three or four attempts, we walked into a lobby, and read the names on the mailboxes. And there it was. Samuel Beckett.
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The True Purpose of Practice
Cultivating the Inner Silence
By: - Jan 13th, 2026We practice not to achieve, but to allow. We practice to become the perfectly still, clear vessel, prepared to receive and reflect the endless wonder of the effortless flow.
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