Restless Ruminations @restlessruminations - Tumblr Blog

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Imagine you are walking in the woods and you see a small dog sitting by a tree. As you approach it, it suddenly lunges at you, teeth bared. You are frightened and angry. But then you notice that one of its legs is caught in a trap. Immediately your mood shifts from anger to concern: you see that the dog’s aggression is coming from a place of vulnerability and pain. This applies to all of us. When we behave in hurtful ways, it is because we are caught in some kind of trap. The more we look through the eyes of wisdom at ourselves and one another, the more we cultivate a compassionate heart.

Tara Brach (via davejwatson)

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Jackie Sibblies Drury and Jeremy O. Harris lead a new era of theater demanding that audiences confront the truths in front of them.

#theater

Thousands of students should have been gathering to cheer on the year’s best shows. But this isn’t a typical year.

#international thespian society

andywarnercomics

In honor of Day of the Dead, here’s a repost of my comic about the San Francisco Columbarium and the man who spent 26 years restoring it.

This comic originally appeared on Medium at The Nib. Go check out my other work there.

true-me-snafu

Emmitt and the Columbarium.

As nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are met with police brutality, John Oliver discusses how the histories of policing and white supremacy are intertwined, the roadblocks to fixing things, and some potential paths forward.

Last night’s John Oliver episode is must-watch. These quotes stand out:

“Defunding the police absolutely does not mean that we eliminate all cops and just succumb to ‘The Purge.’ Instead, it’s about moving away from a narrow conception of public safety that relies on policing and punishment, and investing in a community’s actual safety net. Things like stable housing, mental health services and community organizations. The concept is that the role of the police can then significantly shrink, because they are not responding to the homeless, or to mental health calls, or arresting children in schools, or really any other situation where the best solution is not someone showing up with a gun. That is the idea behind ‘defund the police,’ if you actually listen to it.”

“It is time for the conversation to go beyond, ‘How should the police do their jobs?’ to, 'What, really, do we want the role of the police to be?' (…) This clearly isn’t about individual officers. It’s about a structure built on systemic racism that this country created intentionally, and now needs to dismantle intentionally, and replace with one that takes into account the needs of the people that it actually serves. This is going to take sustained pressure and attention over a long period of time, from all of us. Black communities have had to be perpetual activists while also routinely being disenfranchised, and it is long past time that the rest of us join to make sure their voices are heard and acted upon. Because it’s going to be far too easy for nothing to meaningfully change here.”

A play based on Charles W. Chesnutt’s “Marrow of Tradition” shows the writer of “A Raisin in the Sun” attuned to the history of white violence.

#browner #stephanie

Phrases We Should Work to Eliminate in the Rehearsal Room

“The Colored Museum”

Yesterday I watched “The Colored Museum” by George C. Wolfe on YouTube (from a 1991 PBS recording) -- and wow. I sought it out after re-reading the review of Jordan E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo’” at the Public Theater last year, which acknowledged its debt to “The Colored Museum.” It’s on YouTube in two chunks, running an hour and 15 minutes total. Part 1 “Git on Board” and part 7 “Symbiosis” especially resonated for me.

American theater is beginning to discover Americans. Black theater, women’s theater, gay theater, Hispanic theater — these are more than merely fads or splinter movements. They are attempts by the American theater to come to grips with the multicultural character of our society, to portray it truthfully. As such, they represent simply the artistic face off what is essentially a political transformation.

David Henry Hwang, 1983

Czech theater companies couldn’t perform onstage during the early phases of the pandemic. So they took over a parking lot.

#europe

From the link:

“Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed. It’s a complicated little dance of power and desire: The mainstream is white, so what is presented in the mainstream becomes defined as white, and — ta-da — what you see in viral YouTube videos somehow ends up reinforcing a white norm, even though the historical roots of a dish or an ingredient might be the Levant or East Asia. You might say whiteness works by positing itself as a default. You might also say that this sucks.”

(...)

In the circuits of culture, there are routes to legitimacy and fame, and the problem we have in the food world is that the most reliable path seems to center whiteness again and again.

(...)

“I love that people’s pantries are getting more global,” says Krishna, “but I do hope that when people cook with them, they take the time to educate themselves about the origin of these ingredients, rather than treating them as ingredients in a vacuum, divorced of their context.”

(...)

The only way that changes is representation. “As long as staffs of food websites and publications are mostly white, and as long as the leadership of food websites and publications is mostly white,” Krishna says, “everything other than white food will always be seen as the other, as a museum artifact versus someone’s lived experience.”

In the age of the global pantry, ingredients like turmeric, tahini, and gochujang have finally shaken off their hitherto "exotic" status. Bu

In an engaging and personal talk -- with cameo appearances from his grandmother and Rosa Parks -- human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America's justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of the country's black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives. These issues, which are wrapped up in America's unexamined history, are rarely talked about with this level of candor, insight and persuasiveness.

Fiction by George Saunders: “What would you have done? I know what you will say: you would have fought. But how? How would you have fought?”

I was in seventh grade when I started reading O’Neill. The ferocity of his plays overwhelmed me; his untethered passions and imagination allowed mine to be untethered, too.

A text comes in from a friend who is not in this thread of conversations. It just says, "just feeling sad about making art and dance... i re

What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living?

Fascinating story.

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