 Red Room Writer Profile
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Arlene Goldbard's Blog
November 18, 2009
- A kind reader directed me to The Singing Revolution, a film on Estonians' movement to regain their independence from the Soviet Union, highlighting the special role music played in the sustenance of spirit and solidarity. And also, for me, a film on the double meaning of patriotism, both a shining strength—the indispensable key to independence—and a stupefying weakness, the excuse to elide ...
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November 13, 2009
- As the days shorten, I like to walk at four o'clock, when the light turns thick and golden. Everything it touches seems suspended in honey: the waterbird puffing out its feathers to keep warm, the egret gliding by, the tight, lonely clump of sky-blue ceanothus clinging bravely to life, the pile of dog poop a previous walker has left in my path. The democracy of light. The tide is low, the ...
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November 4, 2009
- President Obama has appointed 25 new members to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, a Reagan-era creation that combines representatives of federal cultural agencies (i.e., National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the U. S. Department of Education, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery ...
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November 1, 2009
- I've begun to see our perceptual capacities as a kind of funhouse (only not always so much fun). Our paths to clear sight are blocked here by obstacles, there by distorting mirrors. It's easiest to spot the places a fellow-traveler has been tricked into thinking a mirror is a window; and hardest when we find ourselves walking smack into a wall, serenely confident until the last second that we ...
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October 25, 2009
- I'm not known for the brevity of my blogposts, but if I had the power to command, this one would consist of three short sentences: Go here and read the Framework. Go here and sign on as an endorser. Go here and share your stories of culture and community. You can do all those things now, then come back and read the rest, okay? But in case you want to be persuaded first, let me try. Art & ...
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October 11, 2009
- Some people blog every day—or at least at regular intervals—but having a blog has been fun for me because I gave myself permission, early on, to write only when a topic taps me on the shoulder, demanding attention. Lately, the intervals have been getting longer and most of the taps come from outside—new developments in cultural politics, things like that. As for the inner taps, it isn't ...
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September 26, 2009
- Dear President Obama: I appreciated your Rosh HaShanah message to Jewish Americans last week, especially the line that read, "Let us resist prejudice, intolerance, and indifference in whatever forms they may take." You declared that on this occasion, "We rededicate ourselves to the work of repairing this world." The time has come to translate these words into action. I want ...
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September 10, 2009
- Three days ago, in an essay about the scapegoating of green jobs advisor Van Jones, who was hounded out of office by wingnut Fox commentator Glenn Beck, I wrote this: We must act now to put a brake on scapegoating before it once again becomes the force that controls public life. The issue will not die down when headlines about Van Jones have faded. Now that Beck has tasted blood, his appetite ...
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September 7, 2009
- We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Dr. Martin Luther King In the Hebrew calendar, this is the time of t'shuvah, literally turning, but often translated as repentance. In preparation for the new year, we inventory our missteps, the damage we have done and the damage ...
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September 1, 2009
- After three months of accepting the boundless hospitality of lovely friends, I am moving into a new apartment, less than a mile along my beloved Bay walk from the house in Richmond where I wrote so many of the essays posted to my blog since 2004. Most of my possessions won't arrive for a couple of weeks. Although I'm looking forward to things like cooking in my own kitchen, which entails ...
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August 16, 2009
- It's hard not to have an ambivalent relationship with political power, no matter how modest. There's some truth to the notion that the people who most crave it are least reliable when they have it; but no more truth than there is to the idea that those who are negatively oriented to power will never have any, to their detriment. Barack Obama was such a surprise as a candidate because he broke ...
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August 9, 2009
- I wish so many people didn't hate the phrase "paradigm shift," because it really does the job of conveying one highly specific thought: that an old model of how things work is receding at the approach of a new and more powerful model (in the words of Ken Wilber, one that "subsumes and transcends" the old). I'm a hard-core paradigm shifter. As I keep telling anyone who will ...
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August 1, 2009
- For several months now, I've been ending every talk I give with the same message to artists and activists: This moment of seismic shifts and insecurity in economies, governments and communities challenges us to make our work equally valid and powerful as art, as spiritual practice and as political speech or action. The first time this thought rocketed through my brain, I felt a thrilling rush ...
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July 25, 2009
- What is the extent of our capacity for imaginative empathy? When is it easy to put oneself in the place of other, and when is the stretch too far to manage? I don't have much trouble imagining how Henry Louis Gates felt earlier this week when he was arrested at the door of his own home. I was brought up to fear and avoid the police. On the scale of historic time, my childhood followed ...
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July 17, 2009
- My media cravings lately have been the audiovisual equivalent of Elvis's peanut butter and banana sandwiches, stupefying comfort food. A kind friend actually sat next to me for the entire length of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants—Part 2!—on TV. So I gulped hard when my forgetfulness in updating my Netflix queue brought me Terror's Advocate, Barbet Schroeder's 137-minute 2007 documentary ...
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