Opinion
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The Effortless Flow of Existence
Surrender and the Cosmic Drive
By: - Dec 02nd, 2025Is the large Norway maple in my garden trying to be alive? What specifically is it doing right this moment to be alive? The answer, if we are honest, is that the tree is doing nothing but allowing. It is not trying to push sap. It is not struggling to expand its canopy or striving to gather light. It is simply allowing the forces of the earth and sun to move through it. It exists in a state of perfect Wu Wei—actionless action.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues Awkward Tangos in Paris
Celebrity and the WC
By: - Dec 03rd, 2025I learned quite a bit about famous people from the way they treated the bartender. The ones who were polite were relaxed, I could sometimes tell just by the way they moved or sat at the bar waiting for the staff to prepare their table––that they were at ease in their skin, as the French expression goes, bien dans leur peau.
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Decentering Whiteness
A Museum Makeover
By: - Dec 12th, 2025A recovering art critic once asked after reading the 1619 Project, “Why don’t you hate all white people?” I asked, “What is a white person anyway?” We realized our identities are far more complex than the containers imposed on us. Whiteness is a burden, built on supremacy, nationalism, colonialism, slavery, and global violence.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues He Volunteered as a Kamikaze
Dwarfs Visited Chez Leroy
By: - Dec 13th, 2025As a young man, he had volunteered as a kamikaze pilot. It was a great honor for his family, he said. The day he was supposed to fly his suicide mission, the war ended, and he was grounded. It was terrible, Namio told us, so shameful for him and his family.
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A Wake for Woke
Trump's Assault on the Arts
By: - Dec 13th, 2025During the next five year cycle when conceiving and funding ambitious exhibitions, administrators, foundations and trustees will keep a watchful eye on potential offenses against the government’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion.
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The Self: Not a Part of Creation
But Creation Itself
By: - Dec 16th, 2025I didn't come into this world; I came out of it, like a leaf emerges from a tree.
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Dishwasher Dialogues Limits of Rational Behaviour
Encounters with Authority
By: - Dec 19th, 2025Life in our Paris may have been uncomfortable with few indoor toilets and fewer phones, but life was more relaxed than today, communication was slower, and the police seemed more tolerant. Maybe that was because the May riots of 1968 were still fresh in the collective memory of Paris.
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Dishwasher Dialogues: Drink Overture of Days
Driving Backwards in Paris
By: - Dec 27th, 2025My grandmother died and left me a thousand dollars; and I bought the second-hand VW. It was a change in my life. A big change. No more carte orange, remember? And parking was no problem in those days in Paris. Nobody ever paid their parking tickets.
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The Universal Religion
Dismantling the Altar of I-ism
By: - Dec 30th, 2025I-ism is the religion of the self, the worship of the ego. It is a faith where the “I” is the central deity, the mind is the high priest, and our desires and fears are the liturgy we recite daily. Unlike other religions that require a conversion, we are initiated into I-ism the moment we first say the word “mine.”
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The Dishwasher Dialogue, In the Red Darkness I Fainted
The Almost Bearable Lightness of Being
By: - Jan 09th, 2026I exposed the photo-canvas to my image and then instead of developing it in the bath I laid out the canvas on the floor, dipped a fat brush in the developer and painted abstractly on the canvas, thick strokes, thin ones, drips here and there and so on. And as I expected here’s what happened. Only in the areas where I had applied the developer with my brush did the image or part of the image appear. On other canvases I applied the developer on the exposed canvas with my hands and in some cases with my body.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Northern Berkshires Blockbuster Arts Summer
From Warhol and Wilco to van Gogh and Inge
By: - May 14th, 2015Now in his final weeks as director of the Clark Art Institute Michael Conforti hosted a media event promoting a blockbuster season for Northern Berkshire County. There were presentations by Joe Thompson for Mass MoCA, Tina Olsen for the Williams College Museum of Art, and Mandy Greenfield for the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Notably absent from the media event were North Adams based arts presenters Downstreet, The Eclipse Mill Gallery, The Rudd Museum of Art and the fall annual Williamstown Film Festival.
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Calm But Alert
Martial Arts and Stillness
By: - Oct 12th, 2020Alan Watts once said that trying to define who you are is like trying to bite your own teeth; one of my Zen Buddhist masters used to say it was like trying to see your own eyeballs.
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Classical Music for Fun
Tom and Jerry and a Roller Coaster
By: - May 10th, 2020If you need a bit of levity, try opening the music below!
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MFA Cancels Programming
Suspended Through August 31
By: - Apr 04th, 2020Responding to the pandemic the MFA has issued this letter to its patrons.
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Music and the Virus
Pitching In
By: - Mar 25th, 2020Many organizations are offering wonderful streaming. Reports suggest that music with videos is doing better than sound only. Atlanta Opera, led by Tomer Zvulun, may be providing the most useful help.
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Donald E. Lacy's Colorstruck
Theater for the New City Mounts Premiere
By: - Mar 01st, 2020Colorstruck and its creators come to us from the San Francisco Bay area where they have been involved in radio, theater and film. They are also participants in community outreach in the arts. Lacy has crafted a one man show which straddles a gap where tears laughter and anger resolve. On an empty stage, Lacy emerges from darkness, a black man in black clothing. He speaks for 75 minutes, lighting up our hearts and minds.
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Recalling Sighting John Updike
The A&P of the Mind
By: - Jun 09th, 2018Summering in Annisquam Martin Mugar, like the Ipswich based author, John Updike, became aware of distinct difference of class and culture. Thre were the easy, self confident debutantes who shopped at the A&P in their bathing suits. And the townies, like Sam, who unnoticed lusted for them. Recently, Mugar was reminded and inspired by watching the author crossing a street ages ago. Here he spins the yarn of old.
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Federal Support for the Arts Under Attack
Five Boston Museum Directors Express Concern
By: - Feb 24th, 2017Five Boston museum directors have signed a letter of concern over reports that the National Endowment for the Arts is under threat of being abolished, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Under the conservative agenda of the Trump adminsitration this is an attack on the arts in America. Guarding the Trumps in NY, DC and Palm Beach for a week is on a par with endowment support.
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Opera Love in Santa Fe
Exploring a Theme
By: - Aug 25th, 2016Love is the theme connecting the five productions of the Santa Fe Opera 2016 Festival. Leading off one week of the season was Don Giovanni, where an attempted rape and then a murder jumpstart the opera. The Don is a questionable subject for the discussion of love, as the Don mows down woman after woman in his quest for the Guinness Book of Records first place position as the world’s best, or most effective, seducer. Yet love triumphs.
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