On the Line

▰ Like a Glove:

The chanters give the puppets voice with intense and compressed screeches, gasps, and tears of terror, shame, and remorse — but they themselves slip from our awareness. Their disembodied voices operate like a soundtrack, synchronized with puppet gesture and emotion: a sinking chest, the kink of an elbow, a feverish shake.

That is Jennifer Homans in The New Yorker describing the art of Japanese puppetry, focusing here on the individuals who give voice to the dolls.

. . .

▰ Spaced Out:

... there are mysteries below our sky:the whale song, the songbird singingits call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

That is Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate, in her brief poem, “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” which could almost be read to suggest there’s enough on Earth worth wondering at, that the skies are a distraction. Almost.

. . .

▰ Room Tone:

In this case, the great volume of air seemed charged and activated, but often I felt that the elegant airiness operated like a buffer and that the work could use some coaxing, that some itinerary or timeline or thematic might have been laid out.

That is critic Alex Kitnick, writing at 4columns.org, about a retrospective of the art of Christine Kozlov currently exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Manhattan. The further context of this description is Kozlov’s Information: No Theory (1970), in Kitnick’s words: “a recording system that commits a room’s sound to magnetic tape only to immediately erase it.”