The comic, or maybe graphic novel series, Love and Rockets is “the rare pop cultural artifact that renders Latinas not as archetypes, but as rich and profound human beings full of messy contradiction and ambivalence. Over the years, Hernandez’s characters have aged and their hairstyles have become more sedate. Some of their faces have grown angular; their bodies, more doughy. In the new comic, in which a group of former punks attempt to relive their youth for a weekend, a group of women joke about menopause in refreshingly real ways.” – Los Angeles Times
Author: ArtsJournal2
It’s Time For Summer Music Festivals, And One Has Finally Figured Out Equal Gender Representation
It’s a pop music festival, of course (where are we with that equal rep, classical and new music festivals?). But not of course, because no other festival has achieved anything like parity. Says the Primavera fest: “It can be done now and it should be done now, but you need to want it. We hope that our move can spark change.” – The Guardian (UK)
Sometimes, TV Lets People Just Be People
That is to say, occasionally trans women get cast as women, no need to elaborate, and sometimes trans men get cast as men, ditto. But. “While television has made great strides in L.G.B.T.Q. inclusion with shows such as Orange Is the New Black and Pose, when trans actors are called in to read for a project, they still find they are only considered for parts specifically written for transgender people.” –The New York Times
What Is A Character Actress?
Margo Martindale, who is so famously called that name that it’s her official title on the Netflix show Bojack Horseman: “Sometimes you do things for money, and sometimes you do things for money that are different, too. But I’m trying very hard not to repeat myself.” – HuffPost
What Was It Like When The Chicago Symphony Returned From Its Seven-Week Strike?
A volunteer usher: “We don’t realize the richness this music brings into our lives until we don’t have it. … Our souls were hungry.” – Chicago Tribune
Rachel Held Evans, An Evangelical Christian Writer Who Questioned Everything About Her Faith, Has Died At 37
In her writing on her site and in her massively popular books, Evans “confronted every controversial issue in American evangelical culture. She wrote about biblical literalism, racism, abortion, evolution, theology, marriage, patriarchy, women in leadership, and evangelical support for Donald Trump. She advocated for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church and analyzed her own complicity in racial bias after the police shooting of Michael Brown.” – Slate
Australia’s Big Portrait Prize Has A Few Issues
Or so says a reviewer of the entries: “Like most creaking institutions built upon the cursed ground of a prize named for a self-hating, racist xenophobe, it’s also haunted.” – The Guardian (UK)
If You Were In Kentucky But Skipped The Derby, Maybe You Were At This Family Bookstore?
Carmichael’s is the oldest independent bookstore in the city, and the founders just passed over the reins to their daughter and niece. How do you “modernize” a bookstore – or do you? – The New York Times
The Pro Ballet Dancer Who Rose From The Refugee Camps
Ahmed Joudah began life in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, auditioned for the main ballet company in Damascus as a completely self-taught dancer when he was 16, then had to flee Syria when the civil war broke out. Now, he says, “I’m a dancer and dance is my passport. But when it comes to the official papers, I have no passport. I’m a stateless refugee, so I have no home. I have no place to go back home, to build a life.” – Deutsche Welle
Why Women Writers Love Rebooting Homer
As anyone who’s read The Iliad knows, it’s about men being mad at each other and going to war. That results in some great writing, true, but there’s a lot more left to say about the cost of anger and war. “The novels compel us to look at that cost, not by a poignant glimpse to the side, as in the Iliad, but as their chief subject. As well they might: after all, slavery, massacres and rape remain real-world consequences of conflict and male aggression.” – The Guardian (UK)