The history of historical re-enactment offers a forceful lesson: it is a better guide to the preoccupations of the present than the reality of yesterday.
"Black Up" is a lesson in forceful insolence, stocked with music that rests in the low end, only to be unpredictably split apart by noise.
Composed primarily of street finds — scraps of fabric and wood, coat hanger wire, pigeon feathers — along with taxidermy pieces, the figures are roughly modeled on Hopi and Zuni katsina dolls, cult objects that embody forceful spirits and are used to convey moral lessons to children.
"This is not a time for further study or vague directives," Mr. Giuliani declared in a speech that alternated between lessons in American civics and forceful appeals to the world to join forces in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
If Mr. Obama draws no other lesson, it is that his early and forceful personal engagement on big issues is indispensable.
The main lesson he took from Mr. Marsalis, he said, was to be forceful.
