“Each award was endowed by visual artists like Ellsworth Kelly and his partner, Jack Shear, as well as the foundations of Cy Twombly and Roy Lichtenstein.” The first round of winners are Lisa Robertson, Anne Boyer, and Fred Moten.
Tag: 01.01.18
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.01.18
Fade to gray
Both of us had a feeling that we might not be coming back to Florida this January, and sure enough, the doctors told us a couple of months ago that the time had come at last for Mrs. T to hang up her traveling shoes and start waiting for the Big Call. This is, lest any of you forget, very good news. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2018-01-01
Wishing You A Perfect 2018
Over the years, the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s head arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne” took on new colors and quirky solo turns each time the band played it, as they invariably did in … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-01-01
When People Claim They’re Defending Against A ‘War On Christmas’, What Exactly Is It They’re Fighting For?
Adam Gopnik: “Christmas has always been a happily mixed-up holiday for mixed-up people and confused cultures. It is, at its roots, the very model of a pagan-secular-synthetic festival as much as it is a religious one – just the kind, in fact, that the imaginary anti-Christmas forces are supposed to favor.”
The Killer-Nanny Novel That Slayed All France And Won The Prix Goncourt
“Chanson Douce, [Leïla Slimani’s] second novel, sold six hundred thousand copies in its first year of publication, making Slimani, who lives in Paris, the most-read author in France in 2016. Elle put her on the cover, in red lipstick and a jumpsuit: ‘leïla slimani superstar.’ Politicians of varying persuasions clambered to reheat themselves in her glow. … Emmanuel Macron, now France’s President, reportedly invited her to be his minister of culture. ‘I love my freedom too much,’ she told me when I asked about it.”
A Homeless Symphony
“There are about fifty-eight thousand homeless people in Los Angeles County. To walk through the streets of Skid Row to the Midnight Mission is to feel shame for the state of the city and the state of the country. Block after block, the sidewalks are crammed with tents, boxes, broken furniture, and shopping carts full of possessions. To enter the mission, you have to step over people in sleeping bags. It is, however, a different experience to visit the Midnight Mission with Vijay Gupta, an L.A. Phil violinist, who, in 2011, founded Street Symphony. He greets both residents and staff with smiles, handshakes, banter, and an explosive laugh.”