one hundred essays I don't have time to write*
*Please consider these essays as starting points. Consider them starting points for someone else to finish.
9. Wabi-Sabi
I cannot pretend to be an expert in the ancient Japanese aesthetic called Wabi-Sabi. In his seminal work In Praise of Shadows, Tanizaki praises the hidden, the dark and the oblique in art and architecture over the bright, the gleaming, the rational. He goes on at length about the pleasures of using a traditional Japanese commode, which is dark, and quiet, and full of shadows. He defames the Western toilet, with its gleaming white tiles. Are our western theaters, like our western toilets, too bright? Too gleaming? Too painted with light? It often seems to me that our Western theaters, the big ones, in terms of design, do not necessarily resemble brightly lit commodes, but do resemble airports. (Of course some of them but not all of them are currently named after airlines. As flying becomes more and more unpleasant, one might wish that the theater lobbies did not carry the faint scentless scent of airports.) Sometimes it seems to me that the whole world is becoming an airport, with more and more glass, with fewer smells to distinguish one place from another, and with nowhere quiet and dark to sit, or sleep. And yet, of course, the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake.