Opinion
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Sarasota Performing Arts Center
Updated Plans
By: - Feb 19th, 2026It has been just under a year since members of the Sarasota Performing Arts Foundation brought their plan for a new performing arts center within The Bay Park to the Sarasota City Commission, hoping to move the public/private partnership forward toward implementation and a final design. What they got instead was an earful of critiques and a charge to return to the drawing board prior to any vote on a controversial project that’s been part of Sarasota’s bayfront revision plan since its start in 2018.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues, Groping for Light
Secrets of the Cave
By: - Feb 18th, 2026The men tried to impress the ladies. We on the staff just raised our eyes and said ‘oh, oh, another major bullshitter’. Few simply said, ‘ahh, c’est un excellent vin’. Oh no, most of them had to embellish with comments about le bouquet, la robe, les larmes, la belle attaque, la couleur, and tra-la-la.
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Programming Joy
Cultural Strategy in an Age of Exhaustion
By: - Feb 12th, 2026I keep returning to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. Few global artists have been as scrutinized and politicized as he has. His communities remain persistently endangered, and his homeland exists within the long, uneasy tensions of American territorial power. By every expectation of protest performance, that stage could have been a site of fury, a reckoning, an indictment, a civic interrogation broadcast to the largest audience on earth.
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Dishwasher Dialogues, Dracula and the Iron Curtain
Operation Jungle Book
By: - Feb 11th, 2026If I had been arrested, I would have given up your name in a heartbeat. Even if they didn’t ask me.
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Cultivating Your Inner Healer
The Power of Qi
By: - Feb 10th, 2026You have the power to cultivate and direct your chi for healing purposes. This isn’t about magic or mysticism; it’s about harnessing the body’s inherent capacity for self-regulation and tapping into a powerful energy source
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Dishwasher Dialogues Latrine Duty with Edgar Allan Poe
Quoth the Raven
By: - Feb 05th, 2026We could eat anything on the menu. Nothing was held back from us. Whatever we wanted. Except for the ‘chitlins’ which as far I remember none of us was capable of eating.
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Dishwasher Dialogues Folly and Madness in Theatre
Blacck to Black
By: - Jan 29th, 2026Given its experimental nature, Black to Black had quite a run after Edinburgh, in a variety of different spaces and theatres in Paris; and then special invitations to festivals in Switzerland and Lyon. Then, along with One Day in May, it was eventually published in Toronto in a Canadian Playwright series.
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The Effortless Path
Tree Is Not Trying To Be a Tree It Just Is
By: - Jan 27th, 2026The busybody spirit, constantly attempting to engineer a better outcome or a superior version of one’s being, traps the consciousness in a cycle of tension and insufficiency. This inherent judgment, this constant striving against the current reality, is what consumes our time and energy, diverting us from the deep, undisturbed reservoir of our original nature
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Fresh Grass and Williamstown Theatre Festival
Cancel 2026 Season
By: - Jan 26th, 2026First Williamstown Theatre Festival and now MASS MoCA's Fresh Grass have cancelled their 2026 seasons.
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Dishwasher Dialogues American Infantilism
Capitalist Art Run Amuck
By: - Jan 21st, 2026From the moment I arrived in Paris, I started writing poems. I was disciplined about that. I was under no illusion that I was going to make much selling poems or plays written in English to a French audience. But I was eager to do something with them. The incongruity of coming to Paris to write in English never seriously crossed my mind.
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Dishwasher Dialogues, Theatre of Mischief
Looking For Samuel Beckett
By: - Jan 16th, 2026The Boulevard Saint Jacques wasn’t that long, it ended at Rue de la Santé. I forget where exactly, and after three or four attempts, we walked into a lobby, and read the names on the mailboxes. And there it was. Samuel Beckett.
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The True Purpose of Practice
Cultivating the Inner Silence
By: - Jan 13th, 2026We practice not to achieve, but to allow. We practice to become the perfectly still, clear vessel, prepared to receive and reflect the endless wonder of the effortless flow.
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The Dishwasher Dialogue, In the Red Darkness I Fainted
The Almost Bearable Lightness of Being
By: - Jan 09th, 2026I exposed the photo-canvas to my image and then instead of developing it in the bath I laid out the canvas on the floor, dipped a fat brush in the developer and painted abstractly on the canvas, thick strokes, thin ones, drips here and there and so on. And as I expected here’s what happened. Only in the areas where I had applied the developer with my brush did the image or part of the image appear. On other canvases I applied the developer on the exposed canvas with my hands and in some cases with my body.
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The Universal Religion
Dismantling the Altar of I-ism
By: - Dec 30th, 2025I-ism is the religion of the self, the worship of the ego. It is a faith where the “I” is the central deity, the mind is the high priest, and our desires and fears are the liturgy we recite daily. Unlike other religions that require a conversion, we are initiated into I-ism the moment we first say the word “mine.”
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Dishwasher Dialogues: Drink Overture of Days
Driving Backwards in Paris
By: - Dec 27th, 2025My grandmother died and left me a thousand dollars; and I bought the second-hand VW. It was a change in my life. A big change. No more carte orange, remember? And parking was no problem in those days in Paris. Nobody ever paid their parking tickets.
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Dishwasher Dialogues Limits of Rational Behaviour
Encounters with Authority
By: - Dec 19th, 2025Life in our Paris may have been uncomfortable with few indoor toilets and fewer phones, but life was more relaxed than today, communication was slower, and the police seemed more tolerant. Maybe that was because the May riots of 1968 were still fresh in the collective memory of Paris.
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The Self: Not a Part of Creation
But Creation Itself
By: - Dec 16th, 2025I didn't come into this world; I came out of it, like a leaf emerges from a tree.
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A Wake for Woke
Trump's Assault on the Arts
By: - Dec 13th, 2025During the next five year cycle when conceiving and funding ambitious exhibitions, administrators, foundations and trustees will keep a watchful eye on potential offenses against the government’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues He Volunteered as a Kamikaze
Dwarfs Visited Chez Leroy
By: - Dec 13th, 2025As a young man, he had volunteered as a kamikaze pilot. It was a great honor for his family, he said. The day he was supposed to fly his suicide mission, the war ended, and he was grounded. It was terrible, Namio told us, so shameful for him and his family.
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Decentering Whiteness
A Museum Makeover
By: - Dec 12th, 2025A recovering art critic once asked after reading the 1619 Project, “Why don’t you hate all white people?” I asked, “What is a white person anyway?” We realized our identities are far more complex than the containers imposed on us. Whiteness is a burden, built on supremacy, nationalism, colonialism, slavery, and global violence.
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The Dishwasher Dialogues Awkward Tangos in Paris
Celebrity and the WC
By: - Dec 03rd, 2025I learned quite a bit about famous people from the way they treated the bartender. The ones who were polite were relaxed, I could sometimes tell just by the way they moved or sat at the bar waiting for the staff to prepare their table––that they were at ease in their skin, as the French expression goes, bien dans leur peau.
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The Effortless Flow of Existence
Surrender and the Cosmic Drive
By: - Dec 02nd, 2025Is the large Norway maple in my garden trying to be alive? What specifically is it doing right this moment to be alive? The answer, if we are honest, is that the tree is doing nothing but allowing. It is not trying to push sap. It is not struggling to expand its canopy or striving to gather light. It is simply allowing the forces of the earth and sun to move through it. It exists in a state of perfect Wu Wei—actionless action.
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Dishwasher Dialogues Pig Alley and Street Theatre
They weren't Wearing Gestapo Uniforms
By: - Nov 27th, 2025One night, I remember hearing loud American voices on the street outside the restaurant. A table of three or four had just left the restaurant and now they were outside the front door, upset about something. Suddenly, one of them swept back in through the red curtains and saloon doors and looked up at me and demanded directions to Pigalle, which she pronounced in a sharp New York accent as ‘Pig Alley’. ‘Where is Pig Alley?’ she demanded. ‘I didn’t come all this way to miss Pig Alley.’
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Dishwasher Dialogues; Cobblestones and the Sorbonne
Des Lecons D'amour
By: - Nov 19th, 2025Remember that evening, when you were still making salads, and I asked you to slip a folded note under the lettuce? From the bar I had seen these two couples come in with an unaccompanied, elegantly dressed, young woman. The waitress placed them at table five. I asked the waitress serving them to remember the salad the single woman ordered. I went back to you in the kitchen, and said, ‘Greg, slip this in her salad, it’s a note I wrote to her’.
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Eternity in the Now
The Perfection of This Complete Moment
By: - Nov 18th, 2025There is a moment in the transition between sleep and wakefulness—a liminal space of deep Stillness—where the voice of the soul often cuts through the static of the day to come. When the mind is truly receptive, it delivers truths unburdened by egoic striving.
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