cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
Mark Bradford isn’t a newcomer — he received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2009, and his paintings fetch up to a million dollars apiece — but I’d never heard of him or seen his work. Thanks as always to the masterful Calvin Tompkins, one of The New Yorker‘s most treasured veteran staff writers, for his fascinating and detailed portrait of this 6’7″ gay black AIDS-aware politically conscious former hair stylist turned painter-sculptor-multimedia artist.
Gamelan Kusuma Laras will be holding our second (free!) annual outdoor klenengan as part of Make Music New York this year, and you’re invited!
Come drop by outside of the Indonesian Consulate on East 68th between Fifth and Madison anytime between 1pm and 6pm on Sunday, June 21st. We’ll be playing the traditional court music of Central Java, along with accompanying members of Saung Budhaya for a Solonese version of the Sundanese Tari Merak! We’ll also be playing a few gendhing from our recent concert, several recognizable favorites, and even more—all lead by our fantastic artistic director I.M. Harjito.
Hope to see you there!
(click on photos to enlarge)
Dragana and Teague with duck sliders at Red Egg
Guy Klucevek, the accordion master, in a home concert hosted by his longtime friend George Russell (below)
Bergdorf windows featuring designs by Donald Robertson
Andy’s new shirt
One of the joys of my first couple of years as a young theater critic in New York City was getting to see the work of Joseph Chaikin, the legendary actor-director who founded the Open Theater, one of the most celebrated experimental theater companies to emerge in the 1960s, along with the Living Theater and the Performance Group. By 1980, even before the Performance Group (founded by Richard Schechner) morphed into the Wooster Group (with Elizabeth LeCompte at the helm), the Open Theater evolved into the Winter Project, an ensemble of superb actors that included Tina Shepard, Ellen Maddow, and Paul Zimet — the folks who spun off their own company, the Talking Band — as well as a very young Will Patton, who went on to an active career in movies, and Ronnie Gilbert, who came to Chaikin’s world with her own celebrity as a member of the rousing politically active singing group the Weavers (whose members also included Pete Seeger). Gilbert was a wonderful, big-hearted presence on and off stage, and I will always treasure the memory of seeing her in productions at La Mama, beginning in 1980 with Tourists and Refugees .(below)
with Gloria Foster in TRESPASSING
MINDFULNESS
Back in 1979, when I started Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, I came up with an operational definition of mindfulness that still serves as well as anything else: mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose in the present moment nonjudgmentally. That doesn’t mean you won’t have any judgments. In fact, when we start paying attention, we realize that we almost have nothing but judgments going through our heads. Just about every thought has reactive emotions associated with it: liking, disliking, wanting, rejecting, greed, aversion, and with plenty of delusion thrown in to leaven the pot. So mindfulness is about getting access to our own awareness with equanimity and without falling into a stream of conceptual thinking that goes on and on and on.
You could say that mindfulness is about cultivating a relationship of intimacy with oneself. But what does that mean? The body is really a big part of this because most of the time, except under very specialized circumstances, we tend to tune out the body completely. We’re in our heads most of the time because it’s challenging to stay in touch with the body. So a good place to start as a focus of attention is the breath. After all, as they used to say, you can’t leave home without it. And we’re always one breath away from not being alive.
The challenge is actually just experiencing one breath in and one breath out. And that means not thinking about the breath or patting ourselves on the back for how wonderfully we breathe or anything like that. It’s just the direct knowing of breathing. But breathing is just the object of attention. Mindfulness isn’t about the object: what it’s really about is the attending itself.
The message of mindfulness is an invitation to everybody to wake up to the true dimensionality of who we all are, and to move in a direction of maximizing the good that comes from our activities and minimizing the harm both to ourselves and others. And that could be done on a corporate level, on a national level, on an international level.
I think the reason we’re seeing so much interest now in mindfulness is that, as a species, we’re starving for authentic experience. But the impulse is to make mindfulness into a kind of catechism, in which some inner circle understands what mindfulness really is and everybody else is deluded. Instead, I think of mindfulness as a big umbrella. The difference between various traditions are unimportant as long as the focus is on creating greater well-being and minimizing harm.
–Jon Kabat-Zinn, “The Reluctant Guru,” Psychotherapy Networker
another eye opens 