![]() But like many such people, including many artists, he was a fierce narcissist, capable only of seeing others in terms of their role in his world. He had good qualities - intelligence, charisma, discipline, skill - he was extraordinary in a number of ways. I had not seen or spoken to him in two years. My father died in April 2013, he was 93 and a half. It has been over four decades since I first had that dream. ![]() It was a child’s solution to the problem posed by a man who I, and everyone around me, saw as the center of the universe. It was a clumsily literal dream that started in my early adolescence, when my father, an architect and craftsman, began sexually molesting me, eventually attempting rape when I was 17. He draws, forms, carves, shoving the beautiful results back out angrily, yelling his fury. We, my mother and sister and I, quietly hand paper, pencils, crayons and charcoal to him through the bars, or we hand in clay, or Styrofoam and a woodburning tool, or large flat trays of moist, densely packed silt with knives to carve it, powders and washes to color it. I am a child at home, and there in our living room is my father, Paolo Soleri, in a large cage, fuming. I used to dream the same thing over and over. ![]() Did admiration of Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love contribute to silence? What about Chinatown, Annie Hall, A Kind of Blue, and maybe Parsifal? That’s a tough debate, and one that started early for me. Part of the challenge for stopping harassment and abuse is sorting out our feelings about the works produced by alleged perpetrators vs. For some of the males around Weinstein, his skill and accomplishments and the power those gave him, helped them look the other way. But it is not only a person’s financial and political power that provides them with cover, there are also ways in which a person’s opus itself becomes a part of the pressure for silence when he behaves badly. The Weinstein revelations have shown how he literally blocked the path of less powerful women, both in the film industry and out. The truth is, these stories really aren’t news until enough people, and preferably famous ones, make lots of noise. But let’s not kid ourselves, the very publications that are now, rightly, devoting space and commentary to reporting and condemning the alleged behavior of Harvey Weinstein over the last 30 plus years, repeatedly rejected pitches and submissions about sexual abuse by an artist and architect they reported on, eulogized, and whose work they continue to follow. Sexual abuse: It’s you, him, and his workĬondemnation of sexual harassment and abuse is having a moment, and that’s reason to cheer.
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