Thursday, February 17, 2011

Bill T. again for me



I've become something of a cynic in my old age. I've been kicked around by the arts enough to be pretty suspicious of artists waxing rhapsodic about their divine gifts to mankind and how much they suffer and how important their work is. I have seen a lot of plain selfishness disguised as artistic intensity (I've a got whole post ready for that as soon as I can figure out how to get a bit of video onto this thing). But Bill T. Jones strikes a chord with me. For those who remember, my blog is named after something he said in an interview with Anne Bogart at the TCG conference a couple of years back. He's arrogant, self-absorbed and sometimes provocative for the sake of being provocative, but there's something rarefied about his artistic commitment that actually gets me believing again.

He was on "On Point" this morning, and this one caller's recollection and his response got me teary and nodding with a sense of real artistic purpose. Listen up:




You can here the whole Podcast here.

Thanks Bill, and Tom, and Marisa.

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