’ll never be able to know anybody else’s thoughts and shit, so I assume that everybody is thinking about things just as deeply as me in their own way. Who am I to say you shouldn’t believe this?
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Donald Trump’s unceasing media travesty brings to mind studies of societal collapse from Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History [he looked at 26 civilizations] through to Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Ronald Wright’s book A Short History of Progress, which Quebec filmmaker Mathieu Roy and I adapted into the theatrical documentary Surviving Progress. Each of them identify as a primary cause of collapse – Wright calls them “progress traps” - the disastrous leadership of elites. They are shown to misgovern through ignorance, self–serving belief systems, and their growing insulation from the interests of the larger society.
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It was as horrifying as it was life-changing, the lack of any facial feature or details erased from her quasi-cartoonish figures engaging in a chaotic interplay of violent revenge and total domination, confronting the viewer with the stubbornness of slavery’s legacy that had been transmuted into 150 years of racist governmental policy and cultural stereotypes.
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If we were to accept the notion that the individual body is a microcosm of the world, and a person’s disease and illness can be mirrored in the ruin of the broader world, then we would have no trouble believing that somehow, each of us struggles between the proclivity for self-destruction and the perpetual hope for healing and survival.
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"READ THE GODDAMN POEM!" Steve bellows from the bar of the Nuyourican Poet's Cafe!
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Every day in America, approximately 91 people die of an opioid overdose. According to the Centers for Disease Control, from 2000 to 2015, more than half a million Americans died of drug overdoses, and opioids account for most of those deaths. This epidemic is so serious that President Trump declared it a national emergency on August 10, 2017. This epidemic could be impacting your family members or friends.
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Science Fiction fans should be really bothered by the fact that The Martian from the Andy Weir novel and film director Ridley Scott won the HUGO award this year.
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An opera singing police officer, modern dancing ghosts and passionate spoken word set to music, artistically explain the cry of urban Philadelphia.
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There hasn’t been a group of friends this stylish and likable since the “Sex in the City” movies. Movie watchers get to see and experience the partying, laughs and see behind the curtain as a group of four friends get ready for a few nights on the town away from home and responsibilities.
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A beautifully produced feast for the eyes, Sara Driver’s new documentary, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat is chock-full of information, (skillfully edited) entertaining, uplifting, informative, gripping, and, most of all, a love letter to artists, art lovers, and the East Village.
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Is everyone a little bit racist? And if so, what does that mean for a country that just eight years ago was trading in casual talk about a post-racial America?
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Brooklyn Museum’s, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women1965 -1985, retrospective, which closed on September 17, brings many fascinating pieces of work out from the archives to showcase a more idealistic and hopeful time.
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What of a land where people’s lives are thwarted at every turn, where prospects are determined by party status, where movements are restricted by permits, orders, and decrees, where “justice” is meted out mercilessly, and against which there is no recourse.
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Having guided America through the assassination of an American President, Roosevelt was a belligerent presence and a powerful leader on the world stage fighting for the American Way of Life. Not everybody liked the first Roosevelt though. Unusual in appearance, there are still unflattering cartoons of him, like the one on the cover, that remain to this day.
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‘Skin me, Brer Fox,’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, ‘snatch out my eyeballs, t’ar out my years by de roots, en cut off my legs,’ sezee, ‘but do please, Brer Fox, don’t fling me in dat brier- patch,’ sezee.
Co’se Brer Fox wanter hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch ’im by de behime legs en slung ’im right in de middle er de brier-patch.’
It is characteristic of our cultural moment that sincerity often sits uneasy in our stomachs. We’ve heard all the lines before. We know them from a million b-list movies we can’t quite recall, but which form a background of white noise to everything we take in today.
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With the almost dystopian world of dating and love explored by Lacey, I was reminded not only of science fiction but of the dating world right now in the twenty-first century.
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Both North and South Indian Classical music gained popularity in the states during the fifties and sixties and can still often be heard in such easy-to-find places as Indian restaurants.
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Polish filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski’s most highly acclaimed film was recently screened for several weeks at the Quad Cinema here in New York City.
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The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard opens with a transcribed interview between Matthew Roudané, the collection's editor, and Shepard himself. The dialogue, like its subject, waxes and wanes across a hundred subjects, painting a picture of a man drenched in American myth.
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