I took a week off blogging last week as I watched the siege of Ukraine. Even as I attended to how the horror unfolded, I was also preparing to move out of New York City (NYC). My goal in leaving is to return to the Ghost Nets site where I restored habitat (1990-2000) in Maine by April 8. In Maine the view I have of the greater world is softer. There are different lessons to learn from that site than what I can learn in NYC. Both trajectories feel driven by familiar narratives about dominance and helplessness but really point us to different and unfamiliar outcomes. The former, siege and the latter, leaving, are narrational styles.

Even as Putin pursues an asymmetric WW III to all our peril, I feel heartened by the global response to the horror In the Ukraine. As Putin threatens nuclear reprisals, it's hard to keep creating, thinking and sharing in the depths of this terrorism. But I think that's part of our resistance. It is resistance to toxic patriarchy and the ecocide which mirrors that toxicity.

All visuals, all art is an exercise in mnemonics, from Monet’s “Water Lilies” to photographs from the fronts of wars, even the bland framed art as wallpaper in a hotel is intended to have an effect on our mind, that is, a non-effect. Tibetan scrolls, in contrast, are intended to take the mind down many corridors of association to spiritual enlightenment.

Please join me this summer and reserve your spot before March 15, 2022 for a two-day catered master class in ecoart in my seaside studio on Vinalhaven.

I had my first dramatic performance at age 11 with the Beechwood Players in Scarborough, New York. It was a one-line roller skate walk-on in which I declaimed, “it’s Midnight!” I got the bug and immersed myself in what I could learn of The Method, practicing Stanislavsky’s exercises in my bedroom. Three years later I got a huge audience response after delivering a soliloquy in my school, at the imagined bedside of my dying boyfriend. A year later, I wrote my first play, “To Love,” about a teenage interracial romance that drives a young girl to consider suicide. A few more years later, I immersed myself in Antonin Artaud’s thinking about the theatre. To this day, I am comfortable with total immersion in whatever I create.

"The young artist of today need no longer say ‘I am a painter’ or ‘a poet’ or ‘a dancer.’ He is simply an ‘artist.’ All of life will be open to him. He will discover out of the ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. He will not try to make them extraordinary. Only their real meaning will be stated. But out of nothing he will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well.” - Allan Kaprow 1958

As I write, the West is bracing for an alarming invasion of the Ukraine by Russia. Comparing Putin to Hitler is not a new idea or hyperbole. I don’t think it’s coincidental that shortly after the original concerns were voiced, Kremlin-friendly Donald Trump rose to power with credible evidence of support from Moscow. There has also been credible evidence of Putin’s support for white supremacist and anti-semitic movements for example in a campaign against Soros to undermine his progressive support for international justice. Putin’s KGB training and education from the STAASI has often been credited for an uncanny brilliance in long term strategic planning to de-stabilize or murder his opponents.

In a recent book review by Kevin Stroud of Dan Jones new book, “Powers and Thrones, A New History of the Middle Ages,” in the New York Times, Stroud references a comparison Jones makes between how early monasteries conveyed information across physical space to how amazon and Facebook transmit data today. The book has been getting a lot of attention. One reason for that attention might be that life under COVID is dark. It is even darker under the shadow of emergent totalitarian patterns emerging in the USA. Kleptocratic fascists are bearing down on America in a relentless tide of psychological terrorism. Life in America now seems like a pretty dark and chaotic place to live in. Jones’ point with his entire book is that the Middle Ages weren’t dark at all and in fact was a time when progressive order emerged from chaos. The implication is that we too might emerge from these chaotic shadows into some semblance of redemptive and salubrious order.

I spent the evening of January 6, 2022, at a Vigil organized by Move On https://front.moveon.org/ for Voting Rights in Verdi Square on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a few blocks North of Trader Joe’s. A snowstorm was predicted. I planned to do a short performance at the event to culminate the project I have been developing for Legal Graffiti. The project has been a series of tests for The Blued Trees Opera.

4:30 PM January 6, at 73rd and Broadway, on the anniversary of the January 6, 2021 attempted coup, a short performance event will conclude my series of online tests for The Blued Trees Opera with the software start-up Legal Graffiti at, “Vigils for Democracy” with Upper West Side MoveOn/Indivisible.”

I will sing relevant original text to the melodic refrain of the first few bars of, “Vissi d’Arte,” from Puccini’s “Tosca.”