Partners in life and in filmmaking, Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo, have always made documentaries that would spread awareness on social justice, human rights, the environment, and the arts. Their most recent work, It Will Be Chaos (Sarà il caos) is an HBO documentary, in Association with Film2, that depicts how life in the South of Italy is thrown into disarray as refugees arrive by the thousands.
Read More
Francis Powell comes from England (he always says jokingly “he's neither Scottish nor Irish, but simply plain English”)- however, for the last ten years or so he's been residing in Paris on a permanent basis. He has made a name for himself as a brilliant musician and a composer of electronic music, known as 'DJ WISE' and meanwhile he has been painting beautiful, sort of 'Art Nouveau- Klimt meets Aboriginal Art' paintings, all coupled with printed samples of his own creative writing and steady journalism. He often says that he belongs to a certain eclectic British tradition of visual artists who often turned musicians and then turned something else.
Read MoreI first met Ben Ruttner (DJ B-Roc) through my sister at our high school in New Hampshire. He was a freshman who wore big t-shirts and sold mix tapes out of his backpack. At the time he was the only DJ in our school. He was also probably the only serious entrepreneur. (All the drug dealers I knew smoked way more than they sold, and everybody else mostly just worked at a bagel shop or hung around the parking lot at the video store.) From his personal mix tape circuit, to packed talent shows, to being a junior DMC finalist, Ben had way more hustle then your average 14 year old dude. He’s 21 now, and living in New York City. The hustle hasn’t stopped, and the music has only gotten better. B-Roc is like Rick Rubin and Russell Simons all at once, a gifted music maker with a mind for the business that I know must go way beyond his years. If in 20 years we’re all downloading Chinese Reggae to an invisible chip in our third ears, I bet B-Roc will have something to do with it.
You just opened up a studio in Chinatown, right?
Yeah. It’s exciting, man. “Heavy Roc Music.” I’m in here every day, and the place is fully operational now [...]
Read More"Absent, I come to the home of the absent," the leading Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, writes. No other poet captures the Palestinian consciousness and collective memory the way he does. At sixty-one, whether he is giving a reading in Paris or Palestine, he draws crowds of thousands, from government officials to schoolteachers, taxi drivers to students. In his latest collection, Judarieh (Mural), the poet finds himself in between love and death, wondering which of the two will conquer. "After the stranger's night, who am I?"
Read MoreFrank Gonzales, otherwise known as"Frankie G.," heats up a seat at the House of Tribes Theatre, a small black box on the Lower East Side of New York City. With a quiet confidence and intense gaze that could melt Alaska, he sits inside the red theatre seat in a black jumpsuit and sneakers, donning a chiseled jaw, gracious humility, and the smoldering eyes of a rising star.
Read MoreDave Hickey is a noted art critic, author of "Air Guitar," and is Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Read MoreOn June 13, when the doors of the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts open for Vision Festival XI, Arts for Art -- the organization that organizes and presents the annual jazz fest -- will also be opening the door to the adoration and criticism they've faced every year for a decade. The praise and complaints are largely for the same thing, namely for hosting hours and hours of high energy jazz. Horns blaring, basses booming and drums being beaten, it's a tradition carried on for some forty years, in the wake of the great John Coltrane.
Read MoreAfrican by Legacy, Mexican by Birth. And we started it in 2003. But actually the discussion comes back to the day that Marco and I met, when, in a conversation, we started talking about Afro-Mexico. I had studied race relation in Latin America and the Caribbean, and that's where I learned about the African presence in Mexico, and the fact that there were still communities.
Read MoreYes. She made photographic plates of images with chocolate as the medium because of how much chocolate resembles dried blood. And also very young is Nida Sinnokrot, the creator of the rubber coated stones, and also Emily Jacir, all in their 20s, early 30s...
Read More