Zephaniah is furious about – for instance – police surveillance of Black communities and the neglect of Grenfell Tower that led to the conflagration there. But he keeps a sense of humor: “When I talk to kids, I tell them about me growing up in gangs in Birmingham and how one day I got up and I went to London and I got involved in another gang and these were a real hard lot. All these kids are listening to me, and they go ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ And I go, ‘It was a gang of poets and painters,’ and they all laugh.”
Tag: 08.25.17
Ten Days In The Overwhelming Disneyland Of Classical Music
The Salzburg Festival is so jammed with usually superb performances – six or eight every day of the six weeks it runs – that it’s hard to tell if anything has changed since a new artistic director took the helm. It’s still star-focused, and “The Vienna Philharmonic, a luxurious, willful house band, remains formidable.”
At Long Last, It’s Their Turn At The Emmys
They met at Sundance Theater Lab 10 years ago, and though they’ve been in high-profile projects since, it wasn’t until 2016 that both Sterling K. Brown and Brian Tyree Henry broke out (which is why you might know them as Randall from “This Is Us” or Paper Boi from “Atlanta”). It’s been quite a ride.
Latin Music Writer, Broadcaster, And Expert Sue Steward – ‘La Reina’ – Dies At 70
Steward became a press officer for Richard Branson’s first foray into a record label in the 1970s, toured with Captain Beefheart, and worked with the Sex Pistols before she became fascinated with promoting both Latin music and what’s often called “world music.”
Now You Can Buy One Of Voyager’s ‘Golden Records’ (On Vinyl)
OK, this is just cool, especially if you’re mature enough to remember the launch of Voyager in 1977: “Using audio from the original tapes from the 1970s, a small team in California has put the Golden Record on vinyl for the first time. The set contains three LPs and a book of the photos that were encoded in the original record.”
The First Job As Artistic Director Of A Nonprofit: Listening To The Stressed-Out Staff Complain
Christopher Morgan’s second job as new artistic director of the beloved Dance Place: “zeroing in on how to make his studios available to local choreographers. He’d like to develop ‘space grants.'”
Netflix Capitalizes On Our Emotions, Including, Especially, Anticipation
It’s science! “Netflix’s deluge of announcements is, for the most part, a welcomed high at a time that has taken us to new lows—often with no roadmap to find our way back. What’s not as obvious is the camouflaged science behind these announcements: Netflix’s long game.”
‘Gone With The Wind’ Is No Longer Going To Be An Annual Tradition At This Memphis Theatre
The Orpheum Theatre screened the film on August 11, the same day of the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville – and commenters weren’t shy about connecting the two. The president of the Orpheum Theatre Group says the decision was made before Charlottesville, but: “As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves,’ the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population.”
Artist Ron Athey, Who Left The Country After The NEA Backlash To His ‘Solar Anus’ In The 1990s, Is Back
Athey says, “Being contextualized in art history for your asshole alone is a feat.” But he adds that if he hadn’t become a performance artist, he would have been a landscaper rescuing Los Angeles from its raggedy lawns. “I’d rather see a nice xeriscaped garden than some poor lawn. I love the garden. I would have a botanical garden — the botanical garden with all the special poison and psychedelic plants.”
Films Catch Up With 2014 Or So
The films, exploring police brutality against African Americans and a lot more, are mostly, but not entirely, documentaries. The director of the Ferguson documentary Whose Streets says, “It sometimes seems like all of our political actions are exhausted or have been compromised, and there’s a real pressing sense of the magnitude of the issues, with no clear path forward. … I think the way out of that is for us to look around, and in our backyard, and tackle problems in front of us, rather than being consumed in this massive huge story.”