Opinion
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The Abundance of the Present
Movement One
By: - May 19th, 2026Those of an age will remember the television show “Dragnet” with Sergeant Joe Friday. It began with the over-voice saying: “Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to hear/see is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” In this case, though, there is no name to change. There is only the writer and the machine, recounting ten days in May when something startling occurred right here in North Adams. The story you are about to read is true, embellished only with a little bit of atmosphere in its telling.
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Summer at Clark Art Institute
Full Schedule of Events
By: - May 18th, 2026The Clark Art Institute announces its summer 2026 events lineup, encouraging visitors to engage with art and nature both inside the galleries and on the grounds. Featuring talks and tours, nature programs, performing arts events, family programs, and special events connected to our summer exhibitions and renowned permanent collection, there is something for all ages
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Call It In the Air
Sheer InsanityLondon 1982
By: - May 18th, 2026Our readers are familiar with Greg Light as one half of the the Parisian dishwashers. Here is the first chapter of a new novel.
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Dishwasher Dialogues If You Live Long Enough Life Ends
Ashes in the Columbarium
By: - May 07th, 2026The Chez Haynes years were forty-five years ago. That’s nearly half a century. We all had dreams, the waitresses and you and I. And we all had vague plans, and we pursued them in Europe and later in America. Most of us went back to the U.S.
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Edith Wharton Summit
At the Mount
By: - Apr 30th, 2026The Mount, Edith Wharton Cultural Center, will host the 2026 Edith Wharton Summit from Thursday, June 4 through Saturday, June 6, 2026, bringing together leading scholars, cultural historians, writers, and Wharton enthusiasts from around the world for three days of inquiry, dialogue, and immersive programming.
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Dishwasher Dialogue, Ginsberg, Cage and Cunningham
The American Center in Paris
By: - Apr 30th, 2026My brother played chess with John Cage and wasn’t polite enough to let him win. Cage was not a very good chess player, but he admired Marcel Duchamp who liked chess.
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Blue Heron Stillness
Book Launch and New Course
By: - Apr 28th, 2026It is with great pleasure that I announce the release of my newest book, "The Stillness of The Blue Heron: A Manual For A Daoist Life of Clarity and Purpose When The World Is In Turmoil." This work is a collection of essays and poetry crafted to provide a sense of peace and direction during challenging times.
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The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College
Summer at the ’62 Center,
By: - Apr 28th, 2026The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College announces Summer at the ’62 Center, a new summer performance series running June 15 through August 29, 2026. The season features more than 30 days of programming and brings together leading arts organizations and local partners from across the Berkshires and beyond.? ?
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Dishwasher Dialogues Da Vinci’s Shoes
The Call of the Aadvark
By: - Apr 23rd, 2026Tippex and carbon paper were the greatest technological innovations for a generation of writers. In the U.S. Tippex was called White-out or even better Liquid Paper. It did what it said, whited out errors and mistakes, and left a liquid blank space on which to try again.
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Mother's Day at The Mount
Season Opens
By: - Apr 21st, 2026The Mount, Edith Wharton Cultural Center is pleased to announce the opening of its 2026 season on Saturday, May 9, 2026. Visitors are invited to return to this historic estate to experience the beauty, history, and cultural legacy of one of America’s most celebrated literary figures, Edith Wharton.
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Dishwasher Dialogues Sleeping with Rothko
Being and Nothingness
By: - Apr 15th, 2026Rafael: The relationship between the photo booth pictures and my photo-canvases was philosophically intimate. By that I mean that both seemed more real to me than oil self-portraits.
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Dishwasher Dialogues, Rauschenberg, Pollock, de Kooning and Lit Dé
So This Is Rauschenberg
By: - Apr 09th, 2026One afternoon we went to see a Robert Rauschenberg show at the Galerie Sonnabend on the rue Mazarine. It consisted of, among other things, flattened, used, tattered, cardboard boxes stuck to the gallery wall.
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Programming at MASS MoCA
Lots to See and Do
By: - Apr 08th, 2026Music isn’t the only art form you can experience outdoors at MASS MoCA this summer: Amanda Lovelee's Homecoming and Pep Rally for the Trees opens on our annual Community Free Day (June 13), and invites visitors to contemplate and celebrate the assisted migration of two “trees-in-residence”. MASS MoCA’s expansive collection of long-term outdoor exhibitions will reopen for the season (May 23) and the indoor galleries continue to sing with newly installed works by Laurie Anderson, the recently opened Technologies of Relation, and a participatory commission by Boston-based Chilean artist Daniela Rivera (on view beginning July 11).
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The Self You’ve Been Seeking is Already Here
Delusion of Lack and Freedom of Becoming Nobody
By: - Apr 07th, 2026We often treat awakening as a destination—a distant mountain peak we must climb through sheer effort, “magic” mantras, or intellectual gymnastics. But there is a persistent shadow that follows the practitioner: the Delusion of Lack. It tells us that who we are right now is insufficient, and that the peace we seek is always just one more book, one more form, or one more retreat away. In my work with students, I see this delusion manifest in two primary ways: the Abyss and the Shield.
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Sarasota Opera House Centennial
Celebrations
By: - Apr 03rd, 2026In 1956, around the time that Elvis Presley was first called the “King of Rock and Roll,” he stepped on the stage of what is now the Sarasota Opera House for four shows that apparently attracted relatively small crowds. Just four years earlier, the theater was packed and the streets outside were crowded for the star-studded premiere of “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Cecil B. DeMille’s look at the circus world that had been partially filmed in Sarasota. It would go on to win the Academy Award for best picture.
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Dishwasher Dialogues Leroy, Bukowski and Simone De Beauvoir
He Had Our Backs
By: - Apr 01st, 2026: The French have a fascination with Charles Bukowski, he seems to confirm their deep-seated need to equate creativity and self-destruction.
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Hermitage Artists Retreat Expands Reach
Gifted Land on Manastoa Key, Florida
By: - Mar 31st, 2026For more than two decades, hundreds of writers, painters, composers, dancers and others have come to the Hermitage Artist Retreat on Florida's Manasota Key for inspiration to create new work. They stay in historic, waterfront cottages as they develop new exhibits, prepare for premieres of plays and symphonies, share ideas with other creatives on the campus or take time to recharge by walking on the beach and watching sunsets.
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Summer at The Mount
Richly Varied Programming
By: - Mar 31st, 2026This summer marks the debut of The Mount’s refreshed visual identity, honoring Edith Wharton’s legacy while embracing the organization’s evolution into a vibrant, multidisciplinary cultural center.
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Dishwasher Dialogues, Get a Real Job
Square One
By: - Mar 26th, 2026I was very lucky. I have met over my life many painters who are better than I am in all ways, better technically, with a more fertile imagination, hard-working and self-disciplined, and they have had no luck, haven’t made it to square one.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues, Parisians Sans Haute Couture
La Sagesse des Clodos
By: - Mar 19th, 2026For the bums in the subway, each person could be a heating source for the other. The metro was usually warm when the stations were underground, and that’s why I never took the bus in winter. They weren’t well-heated. I felt for the clochards, les clodos–—the beggars and the outcasts, who spent their days in the metro.
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The Dance of Change
Understanding Bagua in the Daoist Tradition
By: - Mar 18th, 2026To understand Bagua (Eight Trigrams), one must first look past the physical movements of the martial art and toward the very architecture of the universe as viewed by the ancient Daoist sages. In the Daoist cosmogony, we move from the Wuji (the Empty Void) to the Taiji (the Supreme Ultimate/Yin and Yang). Bagua represents the next step in this unfolding: the diversification of energy into eight fundamental forces that govern all change in the natural world.
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New Human Species Identified
Not Fossil Remains, but Living Today
By: - Mar 17th, 2026Conventional wisdom says that after millions of years of evolution, Homo sapiens is the sole surviving species of human. But in his book Fire in a Wire, Berkshires-based author Steven Reed Nelson disagrees.
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Dishwasher Dialogues, Art and Love in Paris
A Fabulous Bubble
By: - Mar 11th, 2026I think I returned to Europe because I felt less of an exile here. It has nothing to do with passports. I think, at times, that exiles don’t exist. They’re a useful concept for people who exist in places between places. They don’t have any coordinates, no national longitudes, and latitudes.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues, Death and Taxes
Art and Immortality at the Customs Depot
By: - Mar 05th, 2026From the very beginning, I wanted to leave my stamp on the cultural matrix of my time. A word to the wise guy: if, as a painter, immortality isn’t high on your list, then you should do something else.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues, I Have Seen Four People Die
Running with the Bulls
By: - Feb 26th, 2026I have seen four people die in my life so far, that’s it. I want to recount this. The first man I saw die drowned off a beach in Mallorca. When they hauled him out, he was still alive and foaming at the mouth, as if he’d swallowed soap and not seawater. He died a few minutes later. I was eight years old.
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