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Art isn’t something you should protect from yourself. Just run towards it full sprint and embrace how ridiculous your ideas are, how unguarded, how close to something a child might think up, lying on their back in a field overgrown with weeds. The sights and sounds of the rotating world revealing i…

My dad was a garbage truck mechanic on the day shift. Mom worked night shift in a factory line that filled aerosol spray cans, deodorant tubes, perfume bottles. They were trying to save enough money to buy a home of their own. In the meantime we rented a house in a campground.

Just when there wa…

Dropping the taboo on treating characters as if they were real won’t tell us what questions to ask or how to go about answering them. Nor will it tell us what books we should now embrace and try to canonize. Dropping the taboo just increases our freedom to be whatever kind of critic we wish to be, …

Watching Ninagawa in college, I had a single wish: that someone would clap and it would all suddenly be clear to me: the characters I transform into, what I transform from, who I am performing for. There were moments of inanity in everyday American life when I wanted to pull a Ninagawa and make thi…

In his autobiography, Ninagawa recalls an incident from a couple years before his career turned to Shakespeare. A teenager called out his name and approached him outside a movie theater in Shinjuku. The kid had a question he needed to ask: “Can you name any unfulfilled aspirations?” Ninagawa smoked…