Why A Pulitzer-Winning Critic Would Write About Michael Jackson

Margo Jefferson, whose On Michael Jackson is being republished with an updated introduction, explains: “He was the best performer at his peak – an all-encompassing dancing, singing artist in the theatrical tradition of Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis Jr, Jackie Wilson, James Brown, with an acute sense of the mise en scène. He craved omniscient superstar status – a need to top himself with more record sales, bigger audiences, than the last time. By the time I was writing this book, he had become emblematic of complicated dilemmas, cultural obsessions, racial, gender and body metamorphoses.”

Was It Weird For The Jim Crow U.S. To Send African American Musicians Out Into The Cold War World As ‘Jazz Ambassadors’?

Yeah, it was. But that came about thanks to House Rep Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was married to jazz pianist Hazel Scott. “As the State Department is sending some American cultural exports like the Boston Symphony, or acapella singers, or folk dancers around the world, he says, hold on, why don’t we send jazz musicians? There, an art form that’s native to the United States, that no one else can compete with.”

This Photographer’s Subject Says She Was Mistreated And Abused By Him For Years

The artist-muse relationship can be fraught, but it should be one based on mutual respect. “In a blog post published in Japanese in early April after ‘The Incomplete Araki’ opened at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan, the model, Kaori — who uses only her first name — said that over their working relationship, [photographer Nobuyoshi] Araki never signed her to a professional contract; ignored her requests for privacy during photo shoots; neglected to inform her when pictures of her were published or displayed; and often did not pay her. ‘He treated me like an object,’ she wrote.”

Writer Junot Diaz Accused Of Sexual Aggression And Misogynistic Behavior

Diaz, author of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her, has withdrawn from the Sydney Writers’ Festival in the aftermath of the accusations. “Writer Zinzi Clemmons said [an] incident happened when she was a 26-year-old graduate student. She had invited Diaz to speak at a workshop, but Diaz ‘used it as an opportunity to corner and forcibly kiss me,’ Clemmons wrote on Twitter. Other female writers have since come forward, accusing Diaz of mistreatment and misogynistic verbal abuse.”

How Riccardo Chailly Is Remaking La Scala

Italy is supposed to be a serious country these days, burying buffoonery and hedonism among the Coliseum ruins. Even Silvio Berlusconi is seen as an archaeological relic, not to be disturbed. So Riccardo Chailly’s embrace of opera buffa in his first full season as music director provokes the kind of disquiet that we might feel if Covent Garden reinstated Gilbert and Sullivan.