Features

“The Dogs’ Office”

In some sense, animals may possess a more instinctive humanity than we do. The world is our classroom, and all its inhabitants are our teachers.

Our alienation from fishes stems from the fact that they have existed, both literally and figuratively, beneath the surface of our awareness. Gaze over a lake, a river, or an ocean, and while there may be legions of fishes carrying on with their lives within inches of the surface, we witness nothing of it.

An incomplete listicle of how we think about animals.

Mascots in sports–especially animal mascots–create a vision that fans imagine as reality until it becomes tradition. A mascot is a stand-in for how we see ourselves, if only for three or four hours on a Saturday.

Throughout her career thus far (it is hard to remember that she is just 33 years old), Esperanza Spalding has proven that hers is a unique voice in the music industry, easily crossing genre boundaries, yet continuously lauded by jazz musicians and audiences.

Netflix’s mega-popular Narcos series romanticizes Pablo Escobar’s Colombian cartel by effectively distancing the international drug trade in time and place. But like the narcotizing effect of the drug Escobar traded in, gripping television should not lure us from the drug problems of our here and now.

What happens to the body in technologically-mediated live performances, particularly those that continue to be defined as jazz by many audiences? The music of Herbie Hancock, in many ways, answers that question.

In some ways, the current wave of African-American football players kneeling during the national anthem replicates the Bebop revolution that changed the public persona of the black male jazz musician. Now it is black players demanding that audiences recognize that their attitude is not the same as their white peers.

In every decade since the Sheol, the films that resulted reveal wider, prevailing attitudes toward Jewishness, history, memory, and psychological trauma.