PANEL discussion: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence

10/20/2024

Really? So Johnny Depp wants to move on from his tarnished image for domestic violence with a bunch of "stuff" in Chelsea? Really?

Johnny Depp has opened "A Bunch of Stuff," a massive exhibition in New York bringing together artworks he has created over the decades.

10/16/2024

In today's Substack from Heather Cox Richardson, she could not have decribed what's happening more starkly: t. is effectively out of the picture and it is Thiel, Musk & Vance who would rule our world,."Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“' WE MUST NOT LET THESE MALIGNANT NARCISSISTIC POWERMONGERS ANYPLACE NEAR THE WHITE HOUSE!!!!!!!

09/29/2024

These drawings were completed yesterday. They are drying before getting shipped out to be part of the installation at Anita Rogers Oct. 30. The blue lines are sea level rise and the personal habits and routines of thinking and acting that become the familiar ghost nets traps that destroy us all.

07/15/2024

Come see: the latest blog post published:

This week, the Supreme Court of the United States granted the convicted the former President of the United States broad impunity from criminal activity and the consequences of what has looked like treason to many.

06/15/2024

Feminists have never spoken or written much about female on female competition. We all know it exists and can be as lethal as any other jealousy born competition. In 1977, the film, "The Turning Point," first got me thinking deeply about that in the characters of two sisters, one who gives up her career to become a homemaker and the other becomes a prima ballerina. It spoke to me because my own sister & I had also followed divergent paths. Over the years, I have watched Feminist and non-Feminsit identified artists (and other, ie., in the RNC) act out toxic competitions with other women. In the Blued Trees opera, I had suggested some characters be played out by the same performer, ie., the wife and the artist. Now, I'm back to plumbing the depths of the paradigms and where it overlaps with patriarchal and narcissistic systems for my next aria in my cont. hot pursuit of what leads to ecocide.

06/09/2024

In building the new arias for my Blued Trees opera, I've resorted to trying to understand profound motivational drivers, such as narcissism. I think i might mine envy next. One of the most corrosive and baffling responses I've encountered in my career, is envy. In gendered situations, that often gets acted out as gaslighting, forcing a false narrative on someone's life to deflect from feelings iof insecurity. It is one of the greatest professional challenges I've witnessed in others and the most terrifying. As much courage as it takes to build a career in the arts, it takes equal courage to slough off the toxicity of other people's envy.

Red flags of the green-eyed monster.

04/11/2024

Pleased to announce a new blog post (the first since last August!):

Slowly but surely, a culture of impunity is being dismantled as though we might all be waking from a bad dream. This despite every effort on the part of the dominant culture of capitalism and extraction to continue to run rampant.

03/24/2024

In the collaborative work that produced the Blued Trees opera preview last August, I started to come to terms with the motivations of a fossil fuel excutive who would knowlingly commit ecocide to identtify what each aria needs to reveal. I started by wrestling with the psychology of narcissism but hit a brick wall as i tried to come to terms with the scale of devastation. Now I am wrestling with the research on sociopathy, the lonely affectlessness of a person who simply can't feel the repercussions of their choices. I wonder if t. feels that? I believe even for the most entrenched sociopath, it must be a very dark hell to live in, a place of limitless confusion about what it means to be human.

The sociopath remains largely misunderstood.

03/08/2024

https://grist.org/accountability/big-oil-climate-lawsuits-trials-attribution-science-exxon/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily

A quarter of Americans now live in cities and states taking companies to court over lying to the public.

12/30/2023

Very proud to share this wonderful interview with the fabulous librettist for Blued Trees, the brilliant Catherine Filloux:

Catherine Filloux's writing in plays and operas explores the ways human rights are abrogated by gender-based, racial and economic violence.