Jay Wrote

  Linen: The Warp and Weft of History. Jay Wilkinson, April 2025 jewilkinsoniii@gmail --- jwwrote.blogspot.com “Show me that you’ve been working over, Christina.” He leaned forward in the  rocker and touched the square of linen. His speech sounded of his Silesian birthplace.  His granddaughter pulled the piece away from the loom, carefully to keep the threads  aligned and untangled.   He rubbed the cloth between thumb and forefinger and remarked: “Very vell done!  The tight weave will last a lifetime.” “It's my first one, I want it to be right so I don’t forget, poppa. You know I sowed the  the flax seeds, weeded the field, pulled the plants, laid them out, soaked them, broke  and stripped the threads out, carded out the seeds and such.” “Yes, under your muter’s supervision and with Nana’s spinning help. You’ve done  a wonderful job. Talented nine year old, you are.” I am touching this fabric as I write. Did my fifth great-grandfather,Christo...

Northrop Auditorium, March 2025 The audience sat on stage, surrounding a ropeless red boxing ring. As we moved to our seats, Pitts and Tushrik Fredericks, his dance partner and co-combatant, shadow-boxed and wrestled with fast movements, some smooth, some jerky, for a long stretch, never quite touching but so close as to be a sequence of abstracted ballet moves between the two men. Moving together, their legs, arms, abdomens, backs, chests, and hands intertwined but somehow always remained separated by an inch or two as they moved across the ring. This must have been more physically difficult than moves where a hand supported a partner’s leg, a back supported another’s torso.  Pitts is strong, rounded, muscled, - conventionally and undoubtedly handsome or yes, beautiful. Fredericks is skinnier, angular and his strength is more hidden.  They move with enchanted control. Ignorant of dance details, I was glad for the program’s reference to the Lindy Hop, the early 20th Cent...

I looked at his painting and snickered.  His women looked like sullen wax candles melted weeks ago because they stood too close to the hearth.  He could not afford the slow constant heat of good coal, even though we were in the coal fields where Zola had researched Germinal .  Every night as the sun disappeared I scavenged behind the coal wagons that hauled the miners’ piles to the rail spur.  But last night, a pair of armed constables chased me off, one hollering “Van Gogh, if I catch you, you’ll wish you’d never come to visit your failed-preacher brother.”   The coal hopper was empty as we finished the bread and wormy apples that was our dinner.  He went to the vestry and gathered a pile of dusty hymnals and discarded bibles in his arms and returned to the cottage.  Once Genesis and Exodus were sacrificed, Vincent threw whole volumes onto the grate.  The flames leapt high, pages like orange-rimmed black leaves scattered onto the scarred woo...

The topics of censorship, oppression and youth mental health occupy my mind quite a lot these days: Jeez, just grow up!      Toughen them up - they don’t have a clue about stress. Or oppression. If you are shielded from dis-ease in your encounters, you’ll miss a lot of good in the world. Someone else’s myths should not censor me or anyone else. Both my children have had treatment for anxiety. Why would you say something to deliberately hurt someone? Isn’t it as bad to be cruel to a group as it is to a single person?  Or worse? How can you, in your position of privilege, have anything legitimate to say  about this issue to the victims of historic violence? Isn’t some art beyond acceptable? To you?  To everyone? Censorship, Essay 1, Breasts (elsewhere on blog) Censorship, Essay 2 Taravat Talepasand’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” - Art and Action At Macalester College The Art Macalester College, like its neighbor, Hamline University, has recently dealt with question...

None selected  I came home and immediately listened to the soundtrack of Koyaanisqatsi (or “life out of balance” in Hopi), the masterpiece of modern music and video by Philip Glass and Godfrey Reggio. I experienced, with ever-changed ears and saw with new-sighted eyes, the Philip Glass Ensemble play the full score live with a wide-screen showing of the film at Northrup Auditorium more than thirty years ago. It was an intense, beautiful and disturbing experience. Ashwini Ramaswamy’s Invisible Cities , a dance, music and visual show strikes me to be of  equal ambition and is similarly intense and inventive. The music was dynamic and varied, with  classical Carnatic (South Indian) instrumentation and modern production alternating and blending.  The Invisible Cities score is not, like Glass said of his first movement “ahistorical”, but rather it  takes in essences and excellence from the past 2000 years of Indian music and from today’s house, hip hop and cinemati...