Links to Excellence – Light Speaks to the National Endowment For The Arts

Photo Credit: Michael Childers
Courtesy of Rogers & Cowan

Encouraging Arts Education is incumbent upon strong voices lending their platform to keeping arts alive in schools and communities across the nation.

More than an educational elective, the Arts is a prerequisite to imparting cultural appreciation and transforming creative minds into mastered artists.

Here in this Links to Excellence series, Award-winning Actor, Judith Light, shares with the NEA how arts education has defined her life, and its significance to the service of others.

http://arts.gov/art-works/2015/why-arts-education-matters

Roitfeld on Fashion

“Fashion can’t matter more than the individual.  It’s better to be told ‘you’re beautiful tonight,’ rather than being asked, ‘who are you wearing?’”

                                                                            –  Carine Roitfeld, Mademoiselle C

Morrison's Address

There are some creations that are immutably prophetic.  Songs, books, speeches, observations. Precisely, the Creators of the works themselves.

Among the examples I’d consider such as Shakespeare’s Tomorrow, and Gaye’s, concept album, Toni Morrison's Nobel Lecture in Literature Address is a stunning model that marks recent events.  Presented to the Swedish Academy on December 7, 1993, this timeless lecture “autopsyizes” language down to its wounds on society; its healing abilities; and its maintenance of humanity, contingent on the choices we have made and will make with the language that is in our hands.  When I heard the audio edition of this lecture, I gathered from it the way in which language as anything else, beautiful and meaningful can fall and become dead if handled irresponsibly.

Addressing the dark side of language that oppresses and incites violence, the timeliness and timelessness of this lecture has been manifested by youth’s irreverent outbursts on public transits, schoolyards, and malls requiring shutdowns, to physical unrests across the nation.  The words in this speech are timelessly echoed, as unfortunate wars are provoked with instigative language stirring raids and riots decade after decade.      

After the address, enchantingly told as a story – allowing sage and youth to assert their views – it was the accountability offered to both that I found most tender in lieu of blaming the youth.  From it, I deemed a need for elders to share their historical struggles with young to groom consciousness.      

Links to Excellence – Chris Botti in Boston

Courtesy of The Colomby Group

Proving that excellence is never dated, Botti brings sound to passion with Lucia Micarelli in this superlative performance.  

Chris Botti - "Emmanuel" feat. Lucia Micarelli | PBS

Twain on Anger

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

                               –  Mark Twain

Inspired by a Scandalous Moment in Pop Culture

Photo Courtesy/Credit: ABC/Craig Sjodin

The 2014 Fall premiere of Scandal left me reflecting on women’s rights as main character, Olivia Pope, ended the episode advocating for female rights.

Fighting for equality as women since the existence of humanity; throughout the suffrage movement; and to date, perpetually suggest that Man is the higher, privileged gender of [man], hence we as women must continually strive to attain our civility to equal liberties and seize our divine creation as man of mankind, while preserving our procreated “effimination” of man.

When I created this blog, entitling it, The Interiors of Man, it was without specification to gender, but to man as a human race, as I continually seek some of the best male and female artists around the globe to present on this blog.

Gradually approaching another year with Interiors, I humbly look forward to featuring more outstanding artists with an equal balance of male and female artists offering engaging interviews to this expanding audience of readers.

Nin on Writing

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” 

                                                       ― Anaïs Nin