Category: people

In early 2018, We Have Voice began painstakingly crafting the Code of Conduct via meetings, email and Google Hangout sessions, with members collaborating from the far-flung locations where they live and work. The code’s “SAFE(R) spaces” is a term that espouses intersectionality, an acknowledgment that the definition of “safe” shifts according to race, class, and gender and their interdependent systems. If this sounds grimly pietistic, the We Have Voice Collective itself practices intersectionality as joyful action. Encompassing a range of ages, ethnicities (Caucasians are a distinct minority), cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations and career trajectories, the group has fostered a distinct esprit de corps.

“His breakthrough was [the 1955 film] The Dam Busters, about the 1943 British raid against the Ruhr dams in Germany’s industrial heartland. … He was [subsequently] recruited to showman Mike Todd’s big-budget adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1986), starring David Niven.” Best known among his later films were Conduct Unbecoming and Logan’s Run, both starring Michael York.

“Over a career that spanned seven decades Shay pointed his lens at Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Martin Luther King, John. F. Kennedy and Ernest Hemingway – to name a few – for Life, Time, Sports Illustrated and other publications. … He was maced outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. And he flew to Memphis as soon as he heard the Rev. Martin Luther King had been killed. He photographed Hugh Hefner surrounded by Playboy bunnies and captured images of intimidating mobsters who, on at least one occasion, grabbed his camera and removed the film.”

“The group melded rhythm and blues, gospel, doo-wop, rock, blues, soul, jazz, funk and New Orleans’s own parade and Mardi Gras rhythms, in songs that mingled a party spirit with social consciousness. Charles Neville – who usually performed in a beret and a tie-dyed shirt, with an irrepressible smile – was the band’s jazz facet, reflecting his decades of experience before the Neville Brothers got started.”

Burning Man is far, far, far from perfect. It’s still mostly hedonistic (with some awesome exceptions) and corny at times. It’s very white (The Root and The Guardian have both done great interviews with black Burners talking about why). There is always some percentage of douchebags (usually around 20-30 percent) who suck and do stupid things. And, sure, there’s plenty of sex and drugs and music, and some people can’t handle that in a mature way. But I can’t overstate how much I owe to Larry Harvey. Thanks to him, I learned what it is to be inspired by astonishingly creative people, weird people, sexy people, challenging people; to let go of the New York cynicism for a little while; to experience some of the most intense, vivid, and alive times of my life. I learned how to live.

Her images (including one of her young daughter naked, sitting on a rock) often involved her children and her children’s friends in odd and psychologically intense costumes, in the Australian landscape. “Her works were striking in their strange simplicity yet evoked deep emotions and archetypes.”

Hamill also sparked a massive movement of poets against the war with Iraq after being invited to a White House symposium in 2003. “He built a website to present the poems he received, and the White House eventually canceled the symposium. More than 135 poetry readings and other protests were held around the country on Feb. 12, the day the symposium was supposed to begin. More than 13,000 poets submitted work to Mr. Hamill’s website, some of which, including poems by John Balaban, Ursula K. Le Guin and Adrienne Rich, were collected in an anthology, Poets Against the War.“

How to define a word that’s so slippery yet so engrained in everyday use? It’s a tricky task, but moore offers the four main characteristics of fabulousness: It doesn’t have to be expensive; it can be secured in innumerable ways; because it’s largely practiced by queer and other marginalized people, it’s “dangerous, political, confrontational, [and] risky”; and it’s about being a spectacle not only to be seen, but also because certain people are over-surveilled and undervalued. Put another way, fabulousness is primarily about a swashbuckling and transgressive world-making.

A winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions in 1964, the Canadian mezzo had a career at the Met and many North American companies, but she was best known as Joan Sutherland’s co-star on a series of opera recordings conducted by Richard Bonynge, including (among others) Norma, Maria Stuarda, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Les Contes d’Hoffmann.

It was around this time in the interview that all hell broke loose. After sharing that I had made the trip from Los Angeles expressly to see her Lear, I told her that she had helped me to hear a line from the play as if for the first time. When Lear painfully acknowledges a lifetime of neglecting the vulnerable poor (“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!”), it seemed as if Jackson’s political and artistic commitments merged in a rich understanding of the play. “I didn’t write the line,” she roared. “Why do you dismiss Shakespeare?”