ESSAY
MAY 28 2020
Reading about Divine’s garret, I’m driven to remember my own set of garrets, these tiny offset rooms, which with a certain amount of force, could be fashioned into livable spaces, though in my case – and I assume this is one of several marked differences between myself and Divine – I was one of those self-relinquishing children of the petty bourgeoisie who wished for an authentic bohemian independence while taking money in desparation.
ESSAY
MAY 5 2020
A pneumatic fire breathing writer, David tries to surpass the limits of his context, but toward what exactly? He is both the visionary coelacanth and the sonorous bat, muffled — each seeing without seeing. Is Rattray’s purported lack of seeing related to Dana Ward’s inadequacy, each a gift which makes their poetry possible in the first place? If there is vibrancy in these poems there is also the still water calm and depth of someone who has a life behind them.
ESSAY
MAY 2 2020
In the eighth scene of the Pompeii fresco, there’s a kneeling figure, probably the initiate, who’s sobbing, or maybe laughing, in the lap of a haloed person whose eyes are fixed on the descending angel still clutching their whip. The seated haloed figure, perhaps a teacher, gently caresses the initiate’s hair and, with an awkwardly bent right arm, scratches her back. The teacher, Fierz-David tells us, has experienced her own transformative rite but refuses anodyne gestures of understanding – the false empathy of “I’ve been there before.”
POEM ESSAY
MAY 2 2020
... this “greater than” is an excess beyond access, an ellipsis signifying the great beyond of an infinite series, the n+1 of ineffable language, and the silence of a certain kind of privacy that is as multiple as it is diffuse and that at the same time names a “code that could never be structurally secret.” And, so, while each, in their very iterability, may be barred from the other, they are also inextricably bound by a certain sociability. Thus, failure gives ground to a fecund range of possibilities that resist such easy co-existence. If what we have here is a failure to communicate, it is perhaps also the possibility to commune.
POEM
APRIL 28 2020
... This made you smile. Gave you cloying hope that you could one day meet an angel. And so I inverted you. I arrived as a furious father. Then a disappointed coach. Then, later, an indifferent teacher. My authority plundered you, so that eventually there was no me and no you. No clarifying distance to give shape to all this ...
POEM
APRIL 28 2020
... I was never one for lyrics which is why I’ve always fallen so hard for them when finally the line comes around like a fist I can’t help but feel, swaddled in melody’s rapture, and laryngeal friction gives a hard fuck you to the regulative nightmare we once called music ...
POEM ESSAY
APRIL 28 2020
... One of the things I’m most struck by, after reading Dana Ward’s “Typing Wild Speech,” is my own inability to respond to something that, in almost every utterance, gives looping associations to savor, so many thought-lazonges to suck on, and when I finally try to write something in response I’m immediately thrown back on my own inadequacies, which are, as I take it, central to the poem — well not my inadequacies but Dana’s, or maybe, Inadequacy as a quasi-conceptual framework — which is to say the poem is attempting to “sound out the depths” of a burning hole, constituted in great part by barely speakable loss. ...
ESSAY
APRIL 24 2020
... Refracting Rattray through Moten, we might think of tradition less as the hunky-dory mythos of grandfather time and more as what Moten calls “the refuge of an ongoing displacement.” Along these lines, tradition refers to the always-already provisional and improvisational habitus of a people trying to make their way through the muck and wreckage of history. The movement through tradition by way of a process of repetition, revision and critique is what we might call, following Moten, improvisation. And improvisation carries with it both the means toward life ...
REVIEW
September 16 2019
“Lally as Jonathan and Sakowicz as Alex are masterful, commanding, and most importantly, incredibly charming.”
REVIEW
September 10 2015
“The script was developed by Jarboe in association with Sean Lally, who also channeled a louchely sexy, fatuously slow-witted Joe D’Alessandro. Jarboe and Lally’s writing is very smart.”
REVIEW
March 21 2019
“Sean Lally as Elias is a bundle of frustration. [...] He tends to blast in every direction and poke at the problem, only making it worse. He is infuriating and sympathetic all at the same time.”
REVIEW
July 15 2014
“Lally [in rehearsal] is such an honest performer it’s impossible to tell the difference between the raw material written just today and the older more rehearsed bits.”
REVIEW
October 30 2015
"Sean Lally plays multiple roles, but none as sharp as James [...] He's actively bisexual, with [...] a sadistic gleam in his eye [...] Lally and Hodge, dangerous, combustible, are all the gunpowder this plot needs."
REVIEW
October 30 2015
"Lally gives a stand-out performance as Sharpe, Tom Wintour, and King James, making the audience laugh out loud one moment and sending chills up our spines in the next.”
REVIEW
May 5 2014
“Lally puts on a commanding performance in the title role, shifting from Appalachian raconteur to soulless SoCal mogul with unflagging energy [...] delighting in GINT’s unreflective self-invention.”
PROFESSIONAL
August 3 2018
Not long after the European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation, California became the first state to introduce its own suite of consumer privacy rules. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which was signed into law June 28 by Gov. Jerry Brown, includes many provisions aimed at bolstering consumers' privacy rights. Here's an overview of the law and what it means for employers.
PROFESSIONAL
August 3 2018
Though the commission was dissolved earlier this year, Kobach and his acolytes have not given up on their fight against the specter of voter fraud. During the lawsuit – argued in March – Kobach summoned his team of experts, and in doing so, dug his own grave. Hans von Spakovsky, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, spoke about the pervasiveness of voter fraud and the impact a small number of fraudulent voters can have on an election. [...] He later confessed that he couldn’t “identify a single case where the outcome was decided by noncitizen voting.”
PROFESSIONAL
April 3 2018
Things were looking up for Max, until one day, his school pushed back and excluded him from the boys’ locker room. They forced the 15-year old to use a gender-neutral facility, effectively alienating him from his classmates and teachers. Now, Max is a part of an ongoing lawsuit that, so far, is working in his favor – and in favor of transgender youths throughout the US.
PROFESSIONAL
April 30 2018
Alongside the burgeoning gig economy, there has emerged a set of intractable questions around workers’ rights and the application of certain regulations. In Seattle, these questions came to a head, after the city council unanimously voted on an ordinance allowing Uber (and other ride-share) drivers to unionize and negotiate with their employer.
REVIEW
2014
“Sean Lally taps some rich hidden source to portray Biff's bravado, his loser side, his pain, and ultimately his comprehension.”
REVIEW
March 29 2012
“Lally delivers a genuine performance of an awkward teenager in love, transforming into a young man who avenges the death of his friend Mercutio."