Authorities who accepted street art just a couple of years ago are now whitewashing murals, harassing artists, and having them turned out of their studios. Yet they keep on, painting on everything from fallen chunks of concrete to bicycle taxis to El Paquete, the Cuban “internet” that’s passed from house to house on external hard drives. – Pacific Standard
Author: Matthew Westphal
Rijksmuseum Begins Talks With Sri Lanka And Indonesia About Returning Art Looted Art In Colonial Era
“‘It’s a disgrace that the Netherlands is only now turning its attention to the return of the colonial heritage’, Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbets [said]. ‘We should have done it earlier and there is no excuse.’ … The Rijksmuseum has around 4,000 colonial objects, not all of which, Dibbits says, were stolen. All objects are owned by the state so museums cannot take the decision to return an object on their own.” – DutchNews.nl
Jewish Theater Is A Real Thing In The US — Why Not In Britain? (There’s No Shortage Of Jews In Theatre There)
“Jewish theatre artists have been central but often unidentified.” (Harold Pinter, Janet Suzman, Antony Sher, David Lan, Tracy Ann Oberman, Nicholas Hytner, …) “Is this an immigrant people’s anxiety around unwelcome attention? ‘We’re a self-effacing community,’ says playwright Samantha Ellis, ‘we’re afraid to put our heads above the parapet.'” – The Guardian
Wole Soyinka Tells Henry Louis Gates What’s What
The Nobel laureate talks about politics, law, race/ethnic relations, and corruption in both his erstwhile adopted country (the U.S.) and his native land (Nigeria); about what went wrong in South Africa and which sub-Saharan countries are doing well; and about the time he personally desegregated a hotel pool in Atlanta. – New York Review of Books
Cold Turkey Press: ‘Ikkyū Sojun — Nine Poems’
The Rinzai Zen master Ikkyū Sojun (1394-1481) was a poet, musician, artist, and rebel. He led a life of whoring and drinking. His poems — “often erotic, argumentative, contradictory, judgmental, self-doubting, and occasionally shaded with guilt” — are still as startling as the day they were written. – Jan Herman
Recent Listening: Chucho Valdés
Chucho Valdés, Jazz Batá 2 (Mack Avenue)
Valdés’s Jazz Batá was considered a departure into the avant-garde when he made it in 1972. Nearly half a century later, the follow-up finds him as adventurous as ever, heading a quartet that concentrates on mastery of the batá tradition of West Africa. – Doug Ramsey
‘I’m Not A Gay Writer, I’m A Monster. Gay Writers Are Too Conservative.’ Are American Readers Finally Ready For James Purdy?
“Despite praise in his lifetime from Langston Hughes, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, Gore Vidal, as well as – in later years – John Waters and Jonathan Franzen, Purdy … cast out by the US literary establishment,” which wasn’t ready for either his experimental style or his outré subject matter. (Nelson Algren called one of Purdy’s books “a fifth-rate avant-garde soap opera [about] prayer and faggotry.”) And Purdy’s delight in burning bridges didn’t help. – The Guardian
What Stage Dancers Doing On-Camera Work Need To Know
“For dancers with a strictly concert background, making the transition into TV and film can feel like stepping into the unknown. The heightened speed of the rehearsals, ever-changing structure of the sets and somewhat alien nature of the cameras is enough to make even the most seasoned professional a little apprehensive. But dancers can apply the savvy they’ve learned on concert stages to on-camera opportunities.” – Dance Magazine
Why The Cis Director Of The Trans-Themed Film ‘Girl’ Says He Has The Right To Tell This Story
Last year, Lukas Dhont’s debut feature won four prizes at Cannes and a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film; Netflix bought the US rights. Then came the backlash — not only were a cis director and actor appropriating the story, but the film focused too much on the character’s body — and the US release was postponed. And then the woman on whose story the film is based spoke up — for Dhont. – The Guardian
The Life And Loves Of Clara Rockmore, The Diva Of The Theremin
She had had quite a life even before she became the first superstar virtuoso of an electronic instrument: she was a child prodigy on the violin who toured with her pianist sister until injury (and a screaming Leopold Auer) derailed her, she happened on Leon Theremin and his invention at a party at the Plaza Hotel, and she turned down his marriage proposal. – Tablet