I was reminded today about an amazing performance artist I saw in Boston called The Crutchmaster. He’s a dancer who has to use crutches due to a rare form of arthritis, and can do some truly amazing things on these specialty crutches that he found. He says he’s a performance artist, but his pieces are very dance-like, a modern hip-hop dance ensemble that comments on the nature of disability and society’s attitude towards it. He has a website with some video — it gives an idea of what his performance is like, but doesn’t do justice to the live performance. If he comes to town, you should definitely see him.

He gave a talk at MIT while his show was going on at the Dance Umbrella — it’s amazing to me the opportunities for seeing interesting new art and hearing from artists that were facilitated by MIT. It’s those sneak peeks into the less-familiar territories of the arts that are often the most interesting. Berkeley has similar opportunities — I saw DJ Spooky give a talk on art, technology, and theory in his work just last year. But I wasn’t surprised at the opportunities at Berkeley, and I was at MIT.

Apparently you should go to MIT for philosophy even though they have a tiny department. I often wonder how my life would have been different had I gone to some other graduate school — the size of Berkeley took me by surprise, even though I grew up around UIUC. I think I would have found Caltech too claustrophobic, which is why I ended up not going there. And UCSD managed to botch their recruitment effort spectacularly. But perhaps I should have taken a closer look at the faculty. As it stands, I feel very lucky that I found my advisor, since he wasn’t here when I showed up last year.

This is an important story — I only hope that the majority who read about it won’t forget it within a week, as happens with so many other tragedies that happen at MIT.