Even Star Wars – heck, even Disney – can’t protect against Homeland Security. Ahmed made a slight joke about it before explaining that, well, it’s simply scary for him to be traveling in the U.S. right now. – Los Angeles Times
Blog
The Overlooked Work Of Ernie Barnes, The Athlete Turned Celebrity Artist
Barnes, a U.S. football player turned artist who did such things as “creating album covers for Marvin Gaye, receiving a commissioned by Kanye West and being named the official artist of the 1984 Olympics,” still isn’t really part of art history, curators of a new retrospective claim – and that’s what they’re trying to correct, of course. (But it’s not every day that the artist’s professional American football helmet is included in the artist’s show.)- The Guardian (UK)
Why Do So Many Ignore The Suffering In The Poems Of Mary Oliver And Elizabeth Bishop?
Maybe because it’s easier on certain types of reviewers and critics to ignore clear evidence of suffering and pain? “Oliver and Bishop share a clear appetite for animal flail and gore and death. But many readers don’t seem to make very much of this. Critics praise the work, but tend to smile gently, indulgently, upon Bishop’s rhymes, her received forms and elegant impersonality, Oliver’s ‘old-fashioned’ subjects.” – LitHub
The Former Soap Opera Youth Star Whose Parents Made Him Keep A Paper Route
Himesh Patel may be the star of the new Beatles (if they’d never existed) movie Yesterday, but he knows what happens if you don’t keep both feet on the ground in a media career: The New York Times Your parents make you haul out the bike and get on top of that paper route. – The New York Times
When You Want To Feel Inspired By Language, What Should You Read?
Language can be curved, bent, cajoled, broken, reconstituted, made to fit a creators passion. When that’s what you want to read, here are some ideas to put up higher on the TBR pile. – The Rumpus
How Is It That Musicals Both Ultra-Gay And Not Gay At All?
Musicals can help young men, especially (but not only!), come out, and lord knows they’re often campy enough … but where are the happy gay musicals? Other than Bill Rauch’s happy and gay Oklahoma! at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018, really, where exactly are they? – The Stage (UK)
The Author Who Just Won The Dylan Thomas Prize On Code-Switching And Superpowers In London
Guy Gunaratne, whose novel is written in ”a pungent first-person patois,” explains that of course he speaks differently to an interviewer. “publishing is pretty middle class and I’ve had to accommodate. In London, you learn to code-switch quite well and I’ve always thought of that as a superpower in a way. You’re able to express yourself with different vocabulary in different situations, not through any pretence but because the way you express yourself matters, and your social condition is inherited through your inheritance of dialect.” – The Guardian (UK)
Isabelle Sarli, Whose Films Challenged Censors And Created A Sensation In Argentina And The World, Has Died At 89
“Sarli became an instant sex symbol in her feature film debut, in El Trueno Entre las Hojas (Thunder Among the Leaves) in 1958, when she became the first woman to appear fully nude in a mainstream Argentine movie” – and during Argentina’s military dictatorship, her movies were censored, one not being shown until the return of democracy. – The New York Times
This Man Started An Online LGBT Magazine That’s Blocked In His Own Country
As The Atlantic runs a story for the end of Pride Month with the headline claim that “The Struggle for Gay Rights Is Over,” perhaps the author needs to chat with Khalid Abdel-Hadi, a Jordanian whose magazine, created in a place where only 7 percent think LGBT people should have equal rights, is blocked in his own country. (video) – BBC
Women Are Still Working On Changing The Discussion Around The Female Body In Art
Artist Donna Huanca uses semi-nudes to claim space in what she says is still a very male space. “I’m trying to distort the male gaze, to have it be so powerful that it reflects back in a different way.” – Los Angeles Times