“French-speaking Africans have settled and opened businesses on and around West 116th Street since the 1980s, with Petit Senegal lending the bustling thoroughfare a distinctly international air with passers-by in flowing boubous, shops selling phone cards for cheap calls to Africa, and Franco-African restaurants and vegetable stands offering tropical products like hot peppers, plantain and palm oil. But since the 1990s, a small French expat community, attracted by the romanticism of Harlem, its strong sense of community and colorful history, as well as by comparatively lower real estate prices, has sprung up, and, inevitably, so have French restaurants.”
Tag: 04.11.17
Whatever Happened To Google’s Grand Plan To Make Every Book Ever Searchable?
“Two things happened to Google Books on the way from moonshot vision to mundane reality. Soon after launch, it quickly fell from the idealistic ether into a legal bog … that finally ended last year, when the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal by the Authors Guild and definitively lifted the legal cloud … But in that time, another change had come over Google Books, one that’s not all that unusual for institutions and people who get caught up in decade-long legal battles: It lost its drive and ambition.”
Ted Hughes Was Even More Abusive To Sylvia Plath Than We Thought, Per Unpublished Letters
In correspondence with her former therapist, Plath alleged that her husband told her to her face that he wished she were dead and that he beat her just two days before her miscarriage.
Lawsuit Against Art Historian Over Fake Rothko Settled Out Of Court
“The Las Vegas billionaire casino magnate Frank Fertitta has settled his claims against the Swiss art historian Oliver Wick in one of the ten lawsuits brought against the now-defunct Knoedler gallery for knowingly selling fakes. … Fertitta bought a fake Mark Rothko from Knoedler in 2008 for $7.2m.”
Cuba’s Most Famous Dissident Artist Turns To Theatre – Samuel Beckett, No Less
Says Tania Bruguera about her directorial debut, happening this month in Portugal, “I’m interested in how Endgame brings power dynamics into our everyday lives. It feels relevant to see this piece today, when the world is seduced by so-called strong political figures and when democracy is abused instead of enacted. It feels like the end of a chapter.”
San Francisco Ballet’s Lorena Feijoo : The Exit Interview
“Even as she prepares for her company farewell gala, the Havana-born artist remains a highly critical observer of how – and what – she dances.” Allan Ulrich talks with Feijoo about the roles she did and didn’t get to dance and about her training at Alicia Alonso’s famous ballet school and what it has meant for her art.
Patricia McKissack, Children’s Author Who Brought Black History To Life, Dead At 72
In partnership with her husband, Fredrick, “[she] chronicled African American history and Southern folklore in more than 100 early-reader and picture books, including award-winning works about chicken-coop monsters and a girl’s attempt to catch the wind.”
What Does It Mean To Be A “Hispanic” Dance Company? Ballet Hispánico Seeks To Define
“One of the complexities the company faces is that the definition of Hispanic or Latino has become increasingly hybrid, complicated and personal, partly because of the blending brought by immigration and globalization. And also because Latin America is enormously diverse. Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Argentine, Colombian culture: They can seem to have little in common beyond a shared language.”
Meet The Artist Who’s Using Art Against The Turkish Erdoğan Regime
Over the course of six months, she has secretly gathered a 330-page internal police log detailing more than 2,000 cases of state-sanctioned violence against Turkish citizens over the last 11 months; she will be exposing every detail in a performance piece at this year’s Venice Biennale. Details are deliberately being kept on a need-to-know basis to avoid the very real threat of shutdown before the launch, but Onat’s headline-grabbing stunt will form part of Objection – the Pavilion of Humanity created by her and the artist Michal Cole that will transform a Venetian villa “to give an artistic home to women’s rights and freedom of speech”.
Why It’s So Difficult To Tell Stories About Abu Dhabi And Dubai
When people publish stories about the U.A.E., the country is almost always represented entirely by Dubai, which itself is almost always reduced to a glitzy, two-dimensional backdrop: a suitably strange, foreign Elsewhere, chock-full of easy signifiers of the “very old” (dark-skinned men in robes, desert sand) and the “futuristic” (Lamborghinis, postmodern architecture). It appears most commonly in mysteries and thrillers—the perfect dash of exotic spice to liven up a visitor’s investigation into some globe-spanning conspiracy.